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FEUERBA 

THE  ROOTS  OF  THE 
SOCIALIST  PHILOSOPHY 

FREDERICK  EN6ELS 


^yW^S' 


fiDSSELL  L'MOORE. 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

Microsoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/feuerbachrootsofOOengerich 


FEUERBACH 

THE  ROOTS  OF  THE 
SOCIALIST  PHILOSOPHY 


BY 

FREDERICK  ENGELS 


TRANSLATED  WITH  CRITICAL  INTRODUCTION 
BY 


AUSTIN  LEWIS 


CHICAGO 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY 

1003 


10AN  STACK 


Copyright,  1903 
By  Charles  H.  Kerr  &  Company 


INTRODUCTION.     £  5 

This  work  takes  us  back  nearly  sixty 
years,  to  a  time  when  what  is  now  a  move- 
ment of  universal  significance  was  in  its 
infancy.  Hegel  and  the  Revolution  of  1848 ; 
these  are  the  points  of  departure.  To  the 
former,  we  owe  the  philosophic  form  of  the 
socialist  doctrine,  to  the  latter,  its  practical 
activity  as  a  movement. 

In  the  midst  of  the  turmoil  and  strife  and 
apparent  defeat  of  those  days  two  men, 
Marx  and  Engels,  exiled  and  without  influ- 
ence, betook  themselves  to  their  books  and 
began  laboriously  to  fashion  the  form  and 
doctrine  of  the  most  powerful  intellectual 
and  political  movement  of  all  time.  To  the 
task  they  brought  genius,  scholarship,  and 
a  capacity  for  hard  work  and  patient  re- 
search. In  each  of  these  qualities  they  were 
supreme.  Marx  possessed  a  colossal  mind ; 
no  thinker  upon  social  subjects,  not  even 
Herbert  Spencer,  has  been  his  superior,  for 
the  lonely  socialist  could  claim  a  compre- 
hensiveness,  a   grasp   of  relations   and   a 


4  INTRODUCTION 

power  of  generalization,  together  with  a 
boldness  of  conception,  which  place  him  in 
a  class  by  himself.  Engels  was  the  able  co- 
adjutor and  co-worker  with  Marx.  He  was 
a  deep  and  acute  thinker,  a  most  patient  in- 
vestigator, a  careful  writer.  More  practical 
than  his  friend,  he  was  better  able  to  cope 
with  material  problems,  and  his  advice  and 
his  purse  were  always  at  the  disposal  of 
Marx. 

The  latter  could  hardly  have  worked  un- 
der more  discouraging  conditions.  Poverty, 
inadequate  opportunities,  lack  of  stimulat- 
ing companionship,  and  the  complete  ab- 
sence of  any  kind  of  encouragement  and 
such  sympathy  as  a  man  of  his  affectionate 
temperament  craved  fell  to  his  lot.  His 
most  learned  works  were  written  for  groups 
of  workingmen,  his  most  laborious  efforts 
were  made  without  the  slightest  hope  of  rec- 
ognition from  the  learned  and  the  powerful. 

All  through  these  years  Engels  remained 
his  faithful  friend,  and  helped  him  over 
many  hard  places  when  family  troubles  and 
straitened  circumstances  pressed  upon  the 
old  revolutionist. 


INTRODUCTION  5 

This  work  is  Engels'  testimony  with  re- 
gard to  the  method  employed  by  them  in 
arriving  at  their  philosophical  conclusions. 
It  is  the  statement  of  the  philosophical  foun- 
dations of  modern  socialism  by  one  who 
helped  to  lay  them ;  it  is  an  old  man 's  ac- 
count of  the  case  upon  the  preparation  of 
which  he  has  spent  his  entire  life,  for,  this 
work,  short  as  it  is,  represents  the  results  of 
forty  years  of  toil  and  persevering  effort. 

As  the  "Communist  Manifesto"  was  a 
gage  flung  with  all  the  impetuosity  of 
youthful  impatience  into  the  face  of  consti- 
tuted authority,  so  this  is  the  deliberate 
statement  of  the  veteran,  who  has  learned 
the  game  too  well  to  leave  any  openings, 
and  proceeds  to  the  demolition  of  pet  opin- 
ions in  a  quiet,  deadly  and  deliberate  fash- 
ion. 

Step  by  step,  the  argument  is  built  up. 
The  ghosts  of  old  controversies  long  since 
buried  are  raised,  to  show  how  the  doctrine 
imperishably  associated  with  the  names  of 
Marx  and  Engels  came  into  existence;  the 
"Young  Hegelians,"  the  "Tuebingen 
School,  [ 9  and  finally  Feuerbach  himself  are 


6  INTRODUCTION 

summoned  from  the  grave  to  which  the  Rev* 
olution  of  1848  had  consigned  them.  Still, 
ancient  history  as  these  controversies  are 
from  the  German  standpoint,  such  is  the 
backwardness  of  philosophy  among  Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples,  that  we  find  Engels 
exposing  again  and  again  fallacies  which 
persist  even  in  our  time,  and  ridiculing  sen- 
timents which  we  receive  with  approbation 
in  our  political  assemblies,  and  with  mute 
approval  in  our  churches  and  conventicles. 

The  anti-religious  note  is  noticeable 
throughout,  in  itself  an  echo  of  controver- 
sies long  past,  when  the  arguments  of  the 
critics  of  the  Bible  were  creating  now  fury, 
now  dismay,  throughout  Christendom,  be- 
fore the  Higher  Criticism  had  become  re- 
spected, and  before  soi-disant  sceptics  could 
continue  to  go  solemnly  to  church. 

Moreover,  the  work  was  written  in  Ger- 
man for  German  workmen  for  whom  re- 
ligion has  not  the  same  significance  as  it 
apparently  still  continues  to  possess  for  the 
English-speaking  people,  whose  sensitive- 
ness upon  the  subject  appears  to  have  out- 
lived their  faith.     However  that  may  be, 


INTRODUCTION  7 

religious  bodies  possess  a  curious  and  per- 
haps satisfactory  faculty  of  absorbing  the 
truths  of  science,  and  still  continuing  to  ex- 
ist, and  even  to  thrive,  upon  what  the  inex- 
perienced might  easily  mistake  for  a  deadly 
diet. 

Under  the  circumstances  there  is  no  rea- 
son why  Engels '  remarks  should  affect  even 
the  timorous,  although  it  must  be  remem- 
bered that  a  very  able  English  socialist  phi- 
losopher is  reputed  to  have  damaged  his 
chances  irretrievably  by  an  ill-judged  quo- 
tation from  Mr.  Swinburne. 

It  must  be  confessed  that  the  occasional 
bitterness  in  which  Engels  indulges  is  to 
be  deplored,  in  a  work  of  so  essentially  in- 
tellectual a  character,  but  it  is  little  to  be 
wondered  at.  His  contempt  for  univer- 
sity professors  and  the  pretentious  culti- 
vated classes,  who  claim  so  much  upon  such 
slight  grounds,  is  not  strange,  when  we  con- 
sider the  honest  labors  of  himself  and  his 
colleagues  and  the  superficial  place-hunt- 
ing of  the  recognized  savants.  He  loves 
learning  for  its  own  sake,  for  the  sake  of 
truth  and  scientific  accuracy,  and  he  cannot 


8  INTRODUCTION 

feel  anything  but  scorn  for  those  who  use 
it  as  a  means  to  lull  the  consciences  of  the 
rich,  and  to  gain  place  and  power  for  them- 
selves. The  degradation  of  German  philos- 
ophy affects  him  with  a  real  sorrow;  the 
scholar  is  outraged  at  the  mockery.  * '  Ster- 
ility, "  '  *  eclecticism, ' '  these  are  the  terms 
in  which  he  sums  up  the  teachings  of  the 
official  professors,  and  they  are  almost  too 
gentle  to  be  applied  to  the  dispiriting  and 
disheartening  doctrines  which  are  taught 
to  the  English-speaking  student  of  to-day 
under  the  name  of  economics  or  philosophy. 

In  the  first  part  of  his  pamphlet,  for  it  is 
little  more  in  size,  Engels  gives  a  short  and 
concise  account  of  the  work  of  Hegel  and 
the  later  Hegelian  School.  He  shows  how 
the  philosophy  of  Hegel  has  both  a  con- 
servative and  a  radical  side  and  how  con- 
servatives and  radicals  alike  might,  (as  a 
matter  of  fact  they  did),  each  derive  sup- 
port from  his  teachings,  according  to  the 
amount  of  stress  laid  respectively  upon  the 
great  divisions  of  his  work,  the  "System" 
and  the  "Dialectic." 


INTRODUCTION.  9 

The  Extreme  Left  developed  through  the 
application  of  the  dialectic,  and  applied  the. 
philosophic  doctrine  thus  derived  to  the 
criticism  of  existing  political  and  religious 
institutions.  This  resulted  in  the  gradual 
throwing  away  of  the  abstract  part  of  the 
Hegelian  philosophy,  and  in  the  study  of 
facts  and  phenomena  to  an  ever-increasing 
degree. 

Marx  had,  in  his  youth,  allied  himself 
with  the  ' '  Young  Hegelians, ' '  as  this  school 
was  called,  and  this  fact  had  no  slight  in- 
fluence upon  his  subsequent  career.  His 
critics  lay  the  blame  for  much  of  the  ob- 
scurity of  language  from  which  ' '  Capital ' ' 
in  particular  suffers,  at  the  door  of  this 
training.  His  painful  elaboration  of  thesis, 
antithesis,  and  synthesis,  his  insistence 
upon  the  dialectic,  and  his  continual  use  of 
the  Hegelian  philosophical  expressions  are 
due  to  his  earlier  controversial  experiences. 
Still,  on  the  other  hand,  *his  patient  inves- 
tigation of  actual  facts,  his  insistence  on 
the  value  of  positive  knowledge  as  com- 
pared with  abstract  theory,  and  his  diligent 
and  persistent  use  of  blue-books  and  statis- 


10  INTRODUCTION 

tics,  were  in  a  great  measure  results  of  the 
same  training. 

Now  and  again,  we  find  Engels  in  this 
work  displaying  remarkable  controversial 
acumen,  as  in  his  discussion  of  the  phrase, 
"All  that  is  real  is  reasonable,  and  all  that 
is  reasonable  is  real"  (Alles  was  wirklich 
1st,  ist  vernuenftig,  und  alles  was  vernuenf- 
tig  ist,  ist  wirklich).  From  this  expression, 
by  the  development  of  the  Hegelian  argu- 
ment, he  arrives  at  the  conclusion  involved 
in  the  statement  that  the  value  of  a  social 
or  political  phenomenon  is  its  transitori- 
ness,  the  necessity  of  its  disappearance. 
Hence  the  abolition  of  dogmatic  statement 
and  mere  subjective  reasoning  in  the  realm 
of  philosophy,  the  destruction  of  the  old 
school  of  which  Kant  was  the  chief  expo- 
nent, and  the  creation  of  a  new  school  the 
most  advanced  teachers  of  which  were,  as 
they  still  are,  the  materialistic  socialists,  of 
whom  Engels  and  Marx  are  the  chief. 

The  object  of  this  historical  sketch  is  to 
show  the  origin  of  Feuerbach's  philosophy 
as  well  as  of  that  of  Marx  and  Engels.  As 
the  fight  between  the  Young  Hegelians  and 


INTRODUCTION  11 

the  conservatives  grew  hotter,  the  radicals 
were  driven  back  upon  the  English-French 
materialism  of  the  preceding  century.  This 
was  embarrassing  for  followers  of  Hegel, 
who  had  been  taught  to  regard  the  material 
as  the  mere  expression  of  the  Idea.  Feuer- 
bach relieved  them  from  the  contradiction. 
He  grasped  the  question  boldly  and  threw 
the  Hegelian  abstraction  completely  to  one 
side.  His  book,  "Wesen  des  Christen- 
thums,,,  in  which  his  ideas  were  set  forth, 
became  immediately  popular,  and  an  Eng- 
lish translation,  which  was  widely  read, 
was  made  of  it  by  George  Eliot  under  the 
title  of  "Essence  of  Christianity. ' } 

Engels  is  by  no  means  grudging  of  ex- 
pressions of  appreciation  with  regard  to 
this  work,  and  its  effects  both  upon  himself 
and  the  educated  world  in  general.  This 
" unendurable  debt  of  honor' '  paid,  how- 
ever, he  proceeds  to  attack  the  idealistic  hu- 
manitarianism  which  Feuerbach  had  made 
the  basis  and  sanction  of  his  ethical  theo- 
ries. 

Although  Feuerbach  had  arrived  at  the 
materialistic  conclusion,  he  expressed  him- 


12  INTRODUCTION 

self  as  unable  to  accept  materialism  as  a 
doctrine.  He  says  that  as  far  as  the  past 
is  concerned  he  is  a  materialist,  but,  for  the 
future,  he  is  not  so— "Backward  I  am  in 
agreement  with  the  materialists,  forward 
not"— a  statement  which  impels  Engels  to 
examine'  the  materialism  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  which  he  finds  purely  mechanical, 
without  any  conception  of  the  universe  as  a 
process,  and  therefore  utterly  inadequate 
for  the  philosophic  needs  of  the  period  at 
which  Feuerbach  wrote;  for  by  that  time 
the  advance  of  science,  and  the  greater  pow- 
ers of  generalization,  arising  from  patient 
experimentation,  and  the  development  of 
the  evolutionary  theory,  had  rendered  the 
eighteenth  century  views  evidently  absurd. 
The  "vulgarising  peddlers  (vulgarisiren- 
den  Hausirer)  come  in  for  a  great  deal  of 
contempt  at  the  hands  of  Engels.  These 
were  the  popular  materialists— "the  blatant 
atheists, ' 9  who,  without  scientific  knowledge 
and  gifted  with  mere  oratory  or  a  popular 
style  of  writing,  used  every  advance  of 
science  as  a  weapon  of  attack  upon  the  Cre- 
ator and  popular  religion.     Engels  sneers 


INTRODUCTION  13 

at  these  as  not  being  scientists  at  all,  but 
mere  tradesmen  dealing  in  pseudo-scientific 
wares.  He  calls  their  occupation  a  trade,  a 
business  (Geschaeft).  Of  the  same  class  was 
that  host  of  secularist  lecturers  who  at  one 
time  thronged  the  lecture  platforms  of  the 
English-speaking  countries  and  of  whom 
Bradlaugh  and  Ingersoll  were  in  every  way 
the  best  representatives.  These  secularists 
have  now  ceased  to  exercise  any  influence, 
and  the  Freethought  societies,  at  one  time 
so  numerous,  have  now  practically  disap- 
peared. In  accordance  with  the  theories  as 
set  forth  by  Engels  they  were  bound  to  dis- 
appear; their  teachings  had  no  real  bear- 
ing upon  social  progress,  they  contributed 
nothing  of  any  scientific  value  to  modern 
thought,  and  as  Engels  carefully  shows,  the 
reading  of  history  by  these  lecturers  was 
vitiated  by  a  lack  of  scientific  grasp,  and 
inability  to  take  a  rational  view  of  the  great 
principles  of  historical  development. 

In  the  third  part  of  this  little  book  Engels 
deals  with  a  very  interesting  question  which 
still  disturbs  the  minds  of  philosophers, 
and  concerning  which  much  discussion  goes 


14  INTRODUCTION 

on  even  among  the  materialists ;  that  is  the 
question  as  to  the  effect  of  religion  upon 
social  progress.  Feuerbach  had  made  the 
statement  that  periods  of  social  progress 
are  marked  by  religious  changes.  He  uses 
religion  as  a  synonym  for  human  love,  forc- 
ing the  meaning  of  the  word  religion  from 
the  Latin  i ' religare, ' '  "to  tie,"  in  order  to 
give  it  an  etymological  and  derivative  mean- 
ing  in  support  of  his  statement,  a  contro- 
versial trick  for  which  he  is  rebuked  by 
Engels.  The  declaration  that  great  histor- 
ical revolutions  are  accompanied  by  reli- 
gious changes  is  declared  by  Engels  not  to 
be  true,  except  in  a  limited  degree  as  re- 
gards the  three  great  world-religions— 
Christianity,  Mahommedanism  and  Bud- 
dhism. 

Engels  declared  that  the  change  in  reli- 
gion simultaneous  with  economic  and  polit- 
ical revolution  stopped  short  with  the  bour- 
geois revolt  which  was  made  without  any 
appeal  to  religion  whatsoever.  It  is  evident 
that  this  is  not  entirely  true,  for  in  the 
English-speaking  countries,  at  all  events, 
not  only  the  bourgeois  but  frequently  also 


INTRODUCTION  15 

the  proletarian  movements  attempt  to  jus- 
tify themselves  from  Scripture.  The  teach- 
ings of  the  Bible  and  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount  are  frequently  called  to  the  aid  of  the 
revolutionary  party;  Christian  Socialists, 
in  the  English  and  American,  not  the  conti- 
nental sense  of  the  term,  as  such  are  ad- 
mitted to  the  International  Congresses ;  and 
other  evidences  of  the  compatibility  of  reli- 
gion with  the  proletarian  movement  can  be 
traced. 

But  in  the  broader  sense  of  his  statement 
Engels  is  undoubtedly  correct.  The  prole- 
tarian movement,  unlike  that  of  the  bour- 
geois, has  produced  no  definite  religious 
school,  it  has  not  claimed  any  particular  set 
of  religious  doctrines  as  its  own.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  there  appears  to  be  an  ever-wid- 
ening chasm  between  the  Church  and  the  la- 
borer, a  condition  of  affairs  which  is  fre- 
qently  deplored  in  religious  papers.  The 
famous  Papal  Encyclical  on  Labor  was  cer- 
tainly intended  to  retain  the  masses  in  the 
Church,  and  the  formation  of  trades  unions 
under  the  influence  of  the  priests  was  a  log- 
ical conclusion  from  the  teachings  of  the 


16  INTRODUCTION 

Papal  Encyclical.  But  such  religious  move- 
ments are  in  no  sense  representative  of  the 
working-class  movement;  in  fact  they  are 
resented  and  antagonized  by  the  regular 
proletarian  movement  which  proceeds  un- 
der the  leadership  of  the  Socialists. 

Feuerbach's  exaltation  of  humanitarian- 
ism,  as  a  religion,  is  derided  by  Engels  in 
a  semi-jocular,  semi-serious  manner,  for  his 
statement  that  Feuerbach's  ideals  can  be 
completely  realized  on  the  Bourse,  cannot 
be  taken  seriously.  Engels '  clear-sighted- 
ness with  regard  to  the  ineffectiveness  of  a 
purely  humanitarian  religion  is  very  re- 
markable, although  the  forty  years '  addi- 
tional experience  which  he  had  over  Feuer- 
bach  was  a  great  advantage  to  him  in  esti- 
mating the  actual  value  of  humanitarian  re- 
ligion as  an  influence  in  human  affairs. 
Since  the  time  of  Feuerbach  various  expe- 
riments in  the  direction  of  a  religion  based 
entirely  on  Love  have  been  tried,  and  none 
of  them  has  succeeded.  Positivism  or  its 
religious  side  has  been  a  failure.  It  has 
appealed  to  a  small  set  of  men,  some  of 
whom  are  possessed  of  great  ability  and 


INTRODUCTION  17 

have  accomplished  much,  but  as  a  religion 
in  any  adequate  sense  of  the  word  positiv- 
ism will  be  admitted  a  failure  by  its  most 
sincere  adherents.  Brotherhood  Churches, 
the  Church  of  Humanity,  the  People's 
Church,  and  other  like  organizations  have 
been  formed  having  the  same  humanitarian 
basis,  professing  to  cultivate  a  maximum  of 
love  with  a  minimum  of  faith,  and  have 
failed  to  impress  ordinary  men  and  women. 
[Theosophy,  a  system  of  oriental  mysticism 
based  on  an  abstract  conception  of  the 
brotherhood  of  man,  has  also  put  forth  its 
claims  to  notice,  on  the  grounds  of  its  broad 
humanitarianism.  None  of  these  humani- 
tarian religions,  however,  appear  to  satisfy 
the  needs  of  the  times,  which  do  not  seem 
to  demand  any  humanitarian  teachings.  The 
only  religions  which  evidently  persist  are 
the  dogmatic,  those  appealing  undisguised- 
ly  to  faith,  and  even  these  do  not  maintain 
their  proletarian  following. 

Engels '  remarks  appear  to  be  more  than 
justified  by  the  facts  of  to-day,  for  so  far 
from  the  proletarian  forming  a  new  religion 
representing  his  needs  on  the  ideological" 


18  INTRODUCTION 

field,  he  appears  to  be  increasingly  desir- 
ous of  releasing  himself  from  the  bands  of 
any  religion  whatever,  and  substituting  in 
place  of  it  practical  ethics  and  the  teachings 
of  science.  Thus  we  are  informed  that  five 
out  of  six  of  the  working  classes  of  Berlin, 
who  attend  any  Sunday  meetings  whatever, 
are  to  be  found  in  the  halls  of  the  Social 
Democratic  Party,  listening  to  the  lectures 
provided  by  that  organization. 

The  revolutionary  character  of  Feuer- 
bach's  philosophy  is  not  maintained  in  his 
ethic,  which  Engels  declares  with  much 
truth  to  be  no  better  than  that  of  his  prede- 
cessors, as  the  basis  on  which  it  stands  is 
no  more  substantial.  Feuerbach  fails  as  a 
teacher  of  practical  ethics ;  he  is  smothered 
in  abstraction  and  cannot  attain  to  any 
reality. 

"With  the  last  part  of  the  work  Engels 
abandons  the  task  of  criticising  Feuerbach, 
and  proceeds  to  expound  his  own  philos- 
ophy. 

With  absolute  candor  and  modesty  he 
gives  Marx  credit  for  the  theory  of  the  ma- 
terialistic conception  of  history,  upon  the 


INTRODUCTION  19 

enunciation  and  proof  of  which  he  had  him- 
self worked  almost  incessantly  ever  since 
the  first  idea  of  the  theory  had  occurred  to 
them,  forty  years  prior  to  the  time  when  he 
wrote  this  work.  The  footnote  to  the  first 
page  of  the  fourth  part  is  the  testimony  of 
a  collaborator  to  the  genius  of  his  fellow- 
workman,  an  example  of  appreciation  and 
modest  self-effacement  which  it  would  not 
be  easy  to  match,  and  to  which  literary  men 
who  work  together  are  not  over-prone. 
Nothing  else  could  bear  more  eloquent  testi- 
mony to  the  loftiness  of  character  and  sin- 
cerity of  purpose  of  these  two  exiles. 

The  Marxian  philosophy  of  history  is 
clearly  stated,  and  so  fully  explained  by 
Engels  that  there  is  no  need  to  go  over  the 
ground  again,  and  there  only  remains  to 
call  attention  to  some  of  the  modern  devel- 
opments in  the  direction  of  rigidity  of  inter- 
pretation, and  to  the  exaggeration  of  the 
broad  theory  of  the  predominance  of  the 
economic  factor  into  a  hard  and  fast  doc- 
trine of  economic  determinism. 

When  we  examine  the  claims  of  Engels 
on  behalf  of  the  materialistic  doctrine  it 


20  INTRODUCTION 

will  be  found  that  they  are  not  by  any 
means  of  such  a  nature  as  to  warrant  the 
extreme  conclusions  of  subsequent  socialist 
publicists  and  leaders.  It  must  be  remem- 
bered that  the  subject  of  the  influence  of 
economic  conditions  on  religious  and  polit- 
ical phenomena  has  been  closely  examined 
of  late  years  and  continual  and  accumulat- 
ing evidence  has  been  forthcoming  respect- 
ing the  remarkable  influence  of  economic 
facts  upon  all  other  manifestations  of  social 
activity.  It  is  very  probable  that  the  suc- 
cessful investigations  in  this  new  field  have 
led,  temporarily,  to  the  formation  of  exag- 
gerated ideas  as  to  the  actual  value  of  the 
economic  factor. 

Marx,  in  one  of  his  short  critical  notes  on 
Feuerbach,  says:  "The  materialistic  doc- 
trine that  men  are  products  of  conditions 
and  education,  different  men  therefore 
products  of  other  conditions,  and  a  different 
kind  of  education,  forgets  that  circum- 
stances may  be  altered  by  man  and  that  the 
educator  has  himself  to  be  educated.' '  In 
other  words,  the  problem,  like  all  problems, 
possesses  at  least  two  quantities ;  it  is  not  a 
question  solely  of  conditions,  economic  or 
otherwise ;  it  is  a  question  of  man  and  con- 


INTRODUCTION  21 

ditions,  for  the  man  is  never  dissolved  in 
the  conditions,  but  exists  as  a  separate  en- 
tity, and  these  two  elements,  man  and  con- 
ditions, act  and  react  the  one  upon  the 
other. 

This  is  quite  a  different  position  from 
that  taken  by  Lafargue  in  his  fight  with 
Jaures.  Lafargue  there  argued  that  eco- 
nomic development  is  the  sole  determinant 
of  progress,  and  pronounces  in  favor  of  eco- 
nomic determinism,  thus  reducing  the  whole 
of  history  and,  consequently,  the  dominat- 
ing human  motives  to  but  one  elementary 
motive.  Belfort  Bax,  the  well-known  Eng- 
lish socialist  writer,  makes  a  very  clever 
argument  against  the  determinist  position 
by  comparing  it  with  the  attempts  of  the 
pre-Socratic  Greek  philosophers  to  reduce 
nature  to  one  element.  His  remarks  are  so 
pertinent  that  a  brief  abstract  of  his  argu- 
ment is  here  quoted  in  his  own  language. 
He  says  in  "Outlooks  from  a  New  Stand- 
point": 

"The  endeavor  to  reduce  the  whole  of 
Human  life  to  one  element  alone,  to  recon- 
struct all  history  on  the  basis  of  Economics, 


22  INTRODUCTION 

as  already  said,  ignores  the  fact  that  every 
concrete  reality  must  have  a  material  and 
a  formal  side,— that  is,  it  must  have  at  least 
two  ultimate  elements— all  reality  as  op- 
posed to  abstraction  consisting  in  a  syn- 
thesis. The  attempt  to  evolve  the  many- 
sidedness  of  Human  life  out  of  one  of  its 
factors,  no  matter  how  important  that  factor 
may  be,  reminds  one  of  the  attempts  of  the 
early  pre-Socratic  Greeks  to  reduce  nature 
to  one  element,  such  as  water,  air,  fire,  etc." 

And  again: 

* '  The  precise  form  a  movement  takes,  be 
it  intellectual,  ethical  or  artistic,  I  fully  ad- 
mit, is  determined  by  the  material  circum- 
stances of  the  society  in  which  it  acquires 
form  and  shape,  but  it  is  also  determined 
by  those  fundamental  psychological  tenden- 
cies which  have  given  it  birth." 

Enrico  Ferri,  the  famous  Italian  mem- 
ber of  the  Chamber  of  Deputies  and  crimi- 
nologist, appears  to  be  at  one  with  Bax 
in  this  matter.  He  says,  quoting  from  a 
recent  translation  of  his  "Socialism  and 
Modern  Science":  "It  is  perfectly  true 
that  every  phenomenon  as  well  as  every  in- 


INTRODUCTION  23 

stitution— moral,  juridicial  or  political— is 
simply  the  result  of  the  economic  phenom- 
ena and  the  conditions  of  the  transitory, 
physical  and  historical  environments.  But 
as  a  consequence  of  that  law  of  natural  caus- 
ality which  tells  us  that  every  effect  is  al- 
ways the  resultant  of  numerous  concurrent 
causes,  and  not  of  one  cause  alone,  and  that 
every  effect  becomes  in  its  turn  a  cause  ol 
other  phenomena,  it  is  necessary  to  amend 
and  complete  the  too  rigid  form  that  has 
been  given  to  this  true  idea. 

"  Just  as  all  psychical  manifestations  of 
the  individual  are  the  result  of  the  organic 
conditions  (temperament)  and  of  the  envi- 
ronment in  which  he  lives,  in  the  same  way, 
all  the  social  manifestations  of  a  people  are 
the  resultant  of  their  organic  conditions 
(race)  and  of  the  environment,  as  these  are 
the  determining  causes  of  the  given  eco- 
nomic organization  which  is  the  physical 
basis  of  life.  *  ■ 

These  may  be  said  to  be  fairly  represen- 
tative of  the  views  of  the  opposition  to  the 
extreme  of  economic  determinism. 

The  whole  controversy  has  spread  over  a 


24  INTRODUCTION 

tremendous  amount  of  ground  and  involves 
much  reading.  Some  of  the  chief  results 
have  lately  been  summarized  by  Professor 
Seligman  in  his  "Economic  Interpretation 
of  History."  (Macmillan,  1902.)  His  writ- 
ten views  show  a  closer  approximation  to 
and  understanding  of  the  teachings  of  the 
socialist  philosophy  on  this  subject  than 
we  have  been  accustomed  to  receive  at 
the  hands  of  official  savants,  so  that  it  would 
seem  as  if  the  value  of  Marx 's  work  was  at 
last  beginning  to  be  appreciated  even  in  the 
foggy  studies  of  the  professors.  Two  ex- 
tracts from  the  writings  of  Engels  are 
quoted  by  Professor  Seligman.  These  ex- 
tracts apparently  go  to  prove  that  Engels 
by  no  means  contemplated  the  extreme  con- 
struction which  has  been  placed  upon  the 
doctrine,  and  that  he  would  find  such  a  con- 
struction inconsistent  with  his  general 
views. 

These  extracts  are  quoted  here  for  the 
purpose  of  further  elucidating  the  views  of 
Engels  and  as  further  explanatory  of  the 
position  assumed  by  him  in  the  last  part  of 
the  work  under  consideration. 


INTRODUCTION  25 

They  form  part  of  a  series  of  articles 
writen  for  the  ' 6  Sozialistische  Akademiker,, 
in  1890,  and  are  as  follows: 

"Marx  and  I  are  partly  responsible  for 
the  fact  that  the  younger  men  have  some- 
times laid  more  stress  on  the  economic  side 
than  it  deserves.  In  meeting  the  attacks  of 
our  opponents  it  was  necessary  for  us  to  em- 
phasize the  dominant  principle  denied  by 
them,  and  we  did  not  always  have  the  time, 
place,  or  opportunity  to  let  the  other  factors 
which  were  concerned  in  the  mutual  action 
and  reaction  get  their  deserts.' 9 

And  in  another  letter  to  the  same  maga- 
zine he  says:  "According  to  the  material- 
istic view  of  history,  the  factor  which  is,  in 
last  instance,  decisive  in  history  is  the  pro- 
duction and  reproduction  of  actual  life. 
More  than  this  neither  Marx  nor  I  have 
ever  asserted.  But  when  anyone  distorts 
this  so  as  to  read  that  the  economic  factor 
is  the  sole  element  he  converts  the  state- 
ment into  a  meaningless,  abstract,  absurd 
phrase.  The  economic  condition  is  the  ba- 
sis, but  the  various  elements  of  the  super- 
structure—the political  forms  of  the  class- 


26  INTRODUCTION 

contests,  and  their  results,  the  constitutions 
—the  legal  forms  and  also  all  the  reflexes 
of  these  actual  contests  in  the  brains  of  the 
participants,  the  political,  legal,  philosoph- 
ical theories,  the  religious  views— all  these 
exert  an  influence  on  the  development  of  the 
historical  struggles,  and  in  many  instances 
determine  their  form." 

Here  we  may  leave  this  much  disputed 
matter  for  the  present,  as  any  involved  dis- 
cussion of  controversial  questions  would  be 
out  of  place  here.  The  question  in  its  ulti- 
mate form  is  merely  scholastic,  for  not  even 
the  most  extreme  determiniftt  would  hold 
that  only  the  economic  argument  must  be 
relied  upon  by  the  orators  and  the  press  of 
the  proletarian  movement.  Any  one,  how- 
ever, who  wishes  to  pursue  the  subject 
farther  can  find  abundant  material  in  tho 
already  great  and  growing  amount  of  liter- 
ature in  connection  with  it. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  the  ideas  of  Marx 
respecting  the  basis  of  historical  progress 
have  already  revolutionized  the  teaching  of 
history  in  the  universities,  although  but  few 
professors  have  been  honest  enough  to  give 


INTRODUCTION  27 

him  credit  for  it.  The  economic  factor  con- 
tinually acquires  greater  importance  in  the 
eyes  of  the  student  of  history,  but  the  prac- 
tical discoverer  of  this  factor  is  still  slighted 
and  the  results  of  his  labors  are  assimilated 
with  a  self-satisfied  hypocrisy  which  is,  un- 
fortunately, characteristic  of  the  colleges  of 
the  English-speaking  countries. 

The  bourgeois  writers  upon  socialism 
generally  content  themselves  with  the  bold 
statement  that  Marx  employs  the  dialectic 
method  of  investigation  and  statement.  This 
is  so  much  Greek  to  the  ordinary  reader, 
and  the  subject  of  the  dialectic  as  used  by 
socialist  writers  requires  a  few  words  of 
explanation. 

The  first  part  of  this  work  is  very  val- 
uable, therefore,  as  showing  what  Marx  and 
Engels  meant  when  they  used  the  expres- 
sion, and  as  declaring  their  estimation  of 
that  method  compared  with  that  in  general 
use  in  their  day,  and  always,  prior  to  their 
time,  employed  in  philosophy,  history  and 
economics. 

A  fuller  and  more  detailed  definition  of 
the  dialectic  as  applied  by  Engels  is  given 


28  INTRODUCTION 

by  that  philosopher  in  his  famous  reply  to 
Eugene  Duhring  known  as  the  "Umwael- 
zung  der  Wissenschaf t. ' '  In  that  work  a 
more  thorough  and  patient  investigation  is 
made  into  the  sources  of  materialistic  philos- 
ophy of  the  socialist  movement,  for  the  repu- 
tation of  his  antagonist  appears  to  have  act- 
ed as  a  spur  to  Engels'  faculties  which  cer- 
tainly never  showed  to  better  advantage 
than  in  that  work.  A  portion  of  the  argu- 
ment, in  fact  an  abstract  of  the  general  train 
of  reasoning,  with  the  omission  of  the  more 
obviously  controversial  parts,  has  been  re- 
printed under  the  title  of  i '  Socialism  from 
Utopia  to  Science."  The  following  quota- 
tion is  taken  from  the  translation  prepared 
for  the  "People"  in  1892: 

"We  also  find,  upon  a  closer  enquiry,  that 
the  two  poles  of  an  antithesis,  such  as  posi- 
tive and  negative,  are  as  inseparable  from 
as  they  are  opposed  to  each  other,  and  that, 
despite  their  antagonism,  they  mutually 
pervade  each  other ;  and  in  the  same  way 
we  find  cause  and  effect  to  be  conceptions 
whose  force  exists  only  when  applied  to  a 
single  instance,  but  which,  soon  as  we  con- 


INTRODUCTION  29 

sider  that  instance  in  its  connection  with 
the  cosmos,  run  into  each  other  and  dissolve 
in  the  contemplation  of  that  universal  ac- 
tion and  reaction  where  cause  and  effect 
constantly  change  places— that  which  is  ef- 
fect, now  and  here,  becoming,  then  and 
yonder,  cause,  and  vice  versa. 

1 '  None  of  these  processes  and  methods  of 
reasoning  fits  in  the  metaphysical  frame^ 
work  of  thought  To  dialectics,  however, 
which  takes  in  the  objects  and  their  con- 
ceivable images  above  all  in  their  connec- 
tions, their  sequence,  their  motion,  their  rise 
and  decline,  processes  like  the  above  are  so 
many  attestations  of  its  own  method  of  pro- 
cedure. Nature  furnishes  the  test  to  dialec- 
tics, and  this  much  we  must  say  for  modern 
natural  science,  that  it  has  contributed  to- 
wards this  test  an  extremely  rich  and  daily 
increasing  material,  whereby  it  has  demon- 
strated that,  in  the  last  instance,  nature  pro- 
ceeds upon  dialectical,  not  upon  metaphy- 
sical methods,  that  it  does  not  move  upon 
the  eternal  sameness  of  a  perpetually  re- 
curring circle,  but  that  it  goes  through  an 
actual  historic  evolution. 


30  INTRODUCTION 

"This  new  German  philosophy  culmi- 
nated in  the  system  of  Hegel.  There  for 
the  first  time— and  herein  consists  its  merit 
—the  whole  natural,  historic,  and  intellect- 
ual world  was  presented  as  a  process,  i.  e., 
engaged  in  perpetual  motion,  change,  trans- 
formation and  development.  Viewed  from 
this  standpoint,  the  history  of  mankind  no 
longer  appeared  as  a  wild  tangle  of  sense- 
less deeds  of  violence,  all  equally  to  be  re- 
jected by  a  ripened  philosophic  judgment, 
and  which  it  were  best  to  forget  as  soon  as 
possible,  but  as  the  process  of  the  develop- 
ment of  mankind  itself— a  development 
whose  gradual  march,  through  all  its  stray 
paths,  and  its  eternal  law,  through  all 
its  seeming  fortuitousness,  it  now  became 
the  task  of  the  intellect  to  trace  and  to  dis^ 
cover.' ' 

Kirkup,  in  his  "History  of  Socialism,' ' 
has  this  to  say  upon  the  dialectic  method 
of  investigation  as  used  by  Marx:  "In  the 
system  of  Marx,  it  means  that  the  business 
of  enquiry  is  to  trace  the  connection  and 
concatenation  in  the  links  that  make  up  the 
process  of  historic  evolution,  to  investigate 


INTRODUCTION  31 

now  one  stage  succeeds  another  in  the  devel- 
opment of  society,  the  facts  and  forms  of 
human  life  and  history  not  being  stable  and 
stereotyped  things,  but  the  ever-changing 
manifestations  of  the  fluent  and  unresting 
real,  the  course  of  which  it  is  the  duty  of 
science  to  reveal." 

The  translator  has  endeavored  to  render 
the  meaning  of  the  original  in  as  simple  an 
English  form  as  possible,  and  to,  generally 
speaking,  avoid  technical  terms. 

Austin  Lewis. 


AUTHOR'S  PREFACE. 


In  the  preface  of  the  ' '  Critique  of  Polit- 
ical Economy,"  published  at  Berlin,  in 
1859,  Marx  explained  how  we  two,  in  1845, 
in  Brussels,  intended  to  work  out  together 
the  antagonism  of  our  views— that  is,  the 
materialistic  philosophy  of  history,  as  de- 
veloped by  Marx— to  the  ideological  Ger- 
man philosophy,  and,  in  fact,  to  compare  it 
with  our  present  philosophic  knowledge. 
The  design  was  carried  out  in  the  form  of 
a  criticism  of  post-Hegelian  philosophy. 
The  manuscript,  two  big  octavo  volumes, 
had  long  been  at  its  intended  place  of  pub- 
lication in  Westphalia,  when  we  received 
the  news  that  altered  circumstances  did  not 
permit  of  its  being  printed.  We  postponed 
the  publication  of  the  manuscript  indefinite- 
ly, all  the  more  willingly,  as  we  had  attained 
our  main  object,  an  understanding  of  our 
own  position. 


34  AUTHOR'S  PREFACE 

Since  then  more  than  forty  years  have 
elapsed,  and  Marx  has  died  without  either 
of  us  having  had  an  opportunity  of  coming 
back  to  the  antithesis.  As  regards  our  po- 
sition with  reference  to  Hegel,  we  have  ex- 
plained that,  as  occasion  has  arisen,  but, 
nowhere,  as  a  whole.  We  never  came  back 
to  Feuerbach,  who  occupies  an  intermediate 
position  between  the  philosophy  of  Hegel 
and  our  own. 

In  the  meantime  the  Marxian  philosophy 
has  found  champions  beyond  the  bounda- 
ries of  Germany  and  of  Europe,  and  in  all 
the  languages  of  the  civilized  world.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  classic  German  philos- 
ophy has  had  a  sort  of  new-birth  abroad, 
particularly  in  England  and  Scandinavia, 
and  even  in  Germany  they  appear  to  be 
substituting  the  thin  soup  of  eclecticism 
which  seems  to  flow  from  the  universities 
under  the  name  of  philosophy. 

Under  these  circumstances  a  short,  com- 
pact explanation  of  our  relations  to  the 
Hegelian  philosophy,  of  our  going  forth 
and  departure  from  it,  appears  to  me  to  be 
more  and  more  required.    And  just  in  the 


AUTHOR'S  PREFACE  35 

same  way  a  full  recognition  of  the  influence 
which  Feuerbach,  more  than  all  the  other 
post-Hegelian  philosophers,  had  over  us, 
during  the  period  of  our  youthful  enthu- 
siasm, presents  itself  to  me  as  an  unen- 
durable debt  of  honor.  I  also  seize  the  op- 
portunity the  more  readily  since  the  editor 
of  the  "Neue  Zeit"  has  asked  me  for  a  crit- 
ical discussion  of  Starcke's  book  on  Feuer- 
bach. My  work  was  published  in  the  fourth 
and  fifth  volumes  of  1886  of  that  publica- 
tion and  here  appears  in  a  revised  special 
edition. 

Before  sending  this  manuscript  to  press 
I  once  again  hunted  up  and  examined  the 
old  manuscript  of  1845-6.  The  part  of  it 
dealing  with  Feuerbach  is  not  complete. 
The  portion  completed  consists  in  an  exposi- 
tion of  the  materialistic  view  of  history  and 
only  proves  how  incomplete  at  that  time 
was  our  knowledge  of  economic  history. 
The  criticism  of  Feuerbach 's  doctrine  is 
not  given  in  it.  It  was  therefore  unsuitable 
for  our  purpose.  On  the  other  hand,  I  have 
found  in  an  old  volume  of  Marx  the  eleven 
essays  on  Feuerbach  printed  here  as  an  ap- 


36  AUTHOR'S  PREFACE 

pendix.  These  are  notes  hurriedly  scrib- 
bled in  for  later  elaboration,  not  in  the  least 
degree  prepared  for  the  press,  but  inval- 
uable, as  the  first  written  form,  in  which  is 
planted  the  genial  germ  of  the  new  phi- 
losophy. Friedkich  Engels. 

London,  21  February,  1888. 


FEUERBACH 


I. 

The  volume  before  us  brings  us  at  once 
to  a  period  which,  in  the  matter  of  time, 
lies  a  full  generation  behind  us,  but  which 
is  as  foreign  to  the  present  generation  in 
Germany  as  if  it  were  quite  a  century  old. 
And,  still,  it  was  the  period  of  the  prepara- 
tion of  Germany  for  the  revolution  of  1848, 
and  all  that  has  happened  to  us  since  is  only 
a  continuation  of  1848,  only  a  carrying  out 
of  the  last  will  and  testament  of  the  revo- 
lution. 

Just  as  in  France  in  the  eighteenth,  so  in 
Germany  in  the  nineteenth  century,  revolu- 
tionary philosophic  conceptions  introduced 
a  breaking  up  of  existing  political  condi- 
tions. But  how  different  the  two  appear! 
The  French  were  engaged  in  open  fight  with 
all  recognized  science,  with  the  Church,  fre- 
quently also  with  the  State,  their  writings 


38  FEUERBACH 

were  published  beyond  the  frontiers  in  Hol- 
land or  in  England,  and  they  themselves 
were  frequently  imprisoned  in  the  Bastile. 
The  Germans,  on  the  contrary,  were  profes- 
sors, appointed  instructors  of  youth  by  the 
State,  their  writings,  recognized  text-books, 
and  their  definite  system  of  universal  prog- 
ress, the  Hegelian,  raised,  as  it  were,  to  the 
rank  of  a  royal  Prussian  philosophy  of 
government.  And  behind  these  professors, 
behind  their  pedantically  obscure  utter- 
ances, in  their  heavy  wearisome  periods, 
was  it  possible  that  the  revolution  could 
conceal  itself?  Were  not  just  the  peo- 
ple who  were  looked  upon  at  that  time 
as  the  leaders  of  the  revolution,  the  Lib- 
erals, the  bitterest  opponents  of  the 
brain-turning  philosophy?  But  what  neith- 
er the  Governmentalists  nor  the  Liberals 
saw,  that  saw,  at  least  one  man,  and  that 
man  was  Heinrich  Heine. 

Let  us  take  an  example.  No  philosophic 
statement  has  so  invited  the  thanks  of  nar- 
row-minded governments  and  the  anger  of 
the  equally  narrow  Liberals  as  the  famous 
statement  of  Hegel :  "  All  that  is  real  is  rea- 
sonable, and  all  that  is  reasonable  is  real." 


FEUERBACH  39 

This  was  essentially  the  blessing  of  all  that 
is,  the  philosophical  benediction  of  despot- 
ism, police-government,  star-chamber  jus- 
tice and  the  censorship.  So  Frederick  "Wil- 
liam III  and  his  subjects  understood  it ;  but, 
according  to  Hegel,  not  everything  which 
exists  is,  without  exception,  real.  The  at- 
tribute of  reality  belongs  only  to  that  which 
is  at  the  same  time  necessary.  Reality 
proves  itself  in  the  course  of  its  develop- 
ment as  necessity.  Any  governmental  act 
—Hegel  himself  instances  the  example 
of  a  certain  "tax  law"— by  no  means 
strikes  him  as  real  in  the  absence  of  other 
qualities.  But  what  is  necessary  proves 
itself  in  the  last  instance  as  reasonable  also, 
and  applied  to  the  Prussian  government, 
the  Hegel  doctrine,  therefore,  only  means, 
this  state  is  reasonable,  corresponding  with 
reason,  as  long  as  it  is  necessary,  and  if  it 
appear  to  us  an  evil,  but  in  spite  of  the 
evil  still  continues  to  exist,  the  evil  of  the 
government  finds  its  justification  and  its 
explanation  in  the  corresponding  evil  of  the 
subjects.  The  Prussians  of  that  day  had 
the  government  which  they  deserved. 
But  reality,  according  to  Hegel,  is  by  no 


40  FEUERBACH 

means  an  attribute  which  belongs  to  a  given 
social  or  political  condition,  under  all  cir- 
cumstances and  at  all  times.  Quite  the 
contrary.  The  Roman  Republic  was  real, 
but  the  Roman  Empire  which  replaced  it 
was  also  real.  The  French  Monarchy  had 
become  unreal  in  1789,  that  is,  it  had  lost 
all  the  quality  of  necessity,  and  was  so  con- 
trary to  reason  that  it  had  to  be  destroyed 
by  the  Great  Revolution,  of  which  Hegel 
always  speaks  with  the  greatest  enthusiasm. 
Here,  therefore,  the  monarchy  was  the  un- 
real, the  revolution  the  real.  So  in  the 
course  of  progress  all  earlier  reality  be- 
eomes  unreality,  loses  its  necessity,  its 
right  of  existence,  its  rationality;  in  place 
of  the  dying  reality  comes  a  new  vital  real- 
ity, peaceable  when  the  old  is  sufficiently 
sensible  to  go  to  its  death  without  a  strug- 
gle, forcible  when  it  strives  against  this 
necessity.  And  so  the  Hegelian  statement 
through  the  Hegelian  dialectic  turns  to  its 
opposite —all  that  is  real  in  the  course 
of  human  history  becomes  in  the  process 
of  time  irrational  and  is,  therefore,  ac- 
cording to  its  destiny,  irrational,  and  has 
from    the    beginning    inherited    want    of 


FEUERBACH  41 

rationality,  and  everything  which  is  rea- 
sonable in  the  minds  of  men  is  destined  to 
become  real,  however  much  it  may  contra- 
dict the  apparent  reality  of  existing  condi- 
tions. The  statement  of  the  rationality  of 
everything  real  dissolves  itself,  according 
to  the  Hegelian  mode  of  thought,  in  the 
other,  "All  that  stands  has  ultimately  only 
so  much  worth  that  it  must  fall." 

But  just  there  lay  the  true  significance 
and  the  revolutionary  character  of  the 
Hegelian  philosophy  (to  which,  as  the  con- 
clusion of  all  progress  since  Kant,  we  must 
here  limit  ourselves)  in  that  it,  once  and  for 
all,  gave  the  coup  de  grace  to  finiteness  of 
results  of  human  thought  and  action. 
Truth,  which  it  is  the  province  of  philos- 
ophy to  recognize,  was  no  longer,  according 
to  Hegel,  a  collection  of  ready-made  dog- 
matic statements,  which  once  discovered 
must  only  be  thoroughly  learned ;  truth  lay 
now  in  the  process  of  knowledge  itself,  in 
the  long  historical  development  of  learning, 
which  climbs  from  lower  to  ever  higher 
heights  of  knowledge,  without  ever  reach- 
ing the  point  of  so-called  absolute  truth, 
where  it  can  go  no  further,  where  it  has 


42  FEUEKBACH 

nothing  more  to  look  forward  to,  except  tc 
fold  its  hands  in  its  lap  and  contemplate  the 
absolute  truth  already  gained.  And  just 
as  it  is  in  the  realm  of  philosophic  knowl- 
edge, so  is  it  with  every  other  kind  of 
knowledge,  even  with  that  of  practical  com- 
merce. And  just  as  little  as  knowledge  can 
history  find  a  conclusion,  complete  in  one 
completed  ideal  condition  of  humanity,  a 
completed  society,  a  perfect  state,  are 
things  which  can  only  exist  as  phantasies, 
on  the  contrary,  all  successive  historical 
conditions  are  only  places  of  pilgrimage  in 
the  endless  evolutionary  progress  of  human 
society  from  the  lower  to  the  higher.  Every 
step  is  necessary  and  useful  for  the  time 
and  circumstances  to  which  it  owes  its  ori- 
gin, but  it  becomes  weak  and  without  justi- 
fication under  the  newer  and  higher  condi- 
tions which  develop  little  by  little  in  its 
own  womb,  it  must  give  way  to  the  higher 
form,  which  in  turn  comes  to  decay  and 
defeat.  As  the  bourgeoisie  through  the 
greater  industry,  competition,  and  the 
world  market  destroyed  the  practical  value 
of  all  stable  and  anciently  honored  institu- 
tions, so  this  dialectic  philosophy  destroyed 


FEUERBACH  43 

all  theories  of  absolute  truth,  and  of  an  ab- 
solute state  of  humanity  corresponding  with 
them.  In  face  of  it  nothing  final,  absolute 
or  sacred  exists,  it  assigns  mortality  indis- 
criminately, and  nothing  can  exist  before  it 
save  the  unbroken  process  of  coming  into 
existence  and  passing  away,  the  endless 
passing  from  the  lower  to  the  higher,  the 
mere  reflection  of  which  in  the  brain  of  the 
thinker  it  is  itself.  It  has  indeed  also  a 
conservative  side,  it  recognizes  the  suitabil- 
ity of  a  given  condition  of  knowledge  and 
society  for  its  time  and  conditions,  but  only 
so  far.  This  conservatism  of  this  philo- 
sophical view  is  relative,  its  revolutionary 
character  is  absolute,  the  only  absolute 
which  it  allows  to  exist. 

We  do  not,  at  this  point,  need  to  go  into 
the  question  whether  this  philosophy  is 
consistent  throughout  with  the  present  posi- 
tion of  natural  science  which  predicts  for 
the  earth  a  possible  end  and  for  its  inhabit- 
ability,  a  fairly  certain  one;  which,  there- 
fore, also  recognizes  that  in  human  history 
there  is  not  only  an  upshooting  but  also  a 
down-growing  branch.  We  find  ourseKs, 
at  any  rate,  still  a  considerable  distance 


44  FEUERBACH 

from  the  turning  point,  where  the  history 
of  society  begins  to  descend,  and  we  cannot 
expect  the  Hegelian  philosophy  to  meddle 
with  a  subject  which  at  that  time  science 
had  not  yet  placed  upon  the  order  of  the 
day. 

What  must,  indeed,  be  said  is  this,  that 
the  Hegelian  development  does  not,  accord- 
ing to  Hegel,  show  itself  so  clearly.  It  is  a 
necessary  consequence  of  his  method  which 
he  himself  has  never  drawn  with  this  ex- 
plicitness.  And  for  this  simple  reason,  be- 
cause he  was  compelled  to  make  a  system, 
and  a  system  of  philosophy  must,  in  accord- 
ance with  all  its  understood  pretensions, 
(close  somewhere  with  a  definition  of  abso- 
lute truth.  So  Hegel,  therefore,  in  his  logic, 
urged  that  this  eternal  truth  is  nothing  else 
but  the  logical,  that  is,  the  historical  pro- 
cess itself ;  yet  in  spite  of  this  he  finds  him- 
self compelled  to  place  an  end  to  this  proc- 
ess, since  he  must  come  to  an  end  with  his 
system  somewhere  or  other.  He  can  make 
this  end  a  beginning  again  in  logic,  since 
here  the  point  of  conclusion— -the  absolute 
idea,  which  is  only  absolute  in  so  far  as  he 
has  nothing  clear  to  say  about  it— divests  it- 


FEUERBACH  45 

self  in  nature,  that  is,  becomes  transformed, 
and  later  on,  in  spirit,  that  is,  in  thought 
and  in  history,  comes  to  itself  again.  But 
in  the  last  philosophical  analysis,  a  return 
to  the  beginning  is  only  possible  in  one 
way,  namely,  if  one  place  the  end  of  history 
in  this  fact,  that  mankind  comes  to  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  absolute  idea,  and  explain  that 
this  knowledge  of  the  absolute  idea  is  ob- 
tained in  the  Hegelian  philosophy.  But  in 
this  way  the  whole  dogmatic  content  of  the 
Hegelian  philosophy  in  the  matter  of  abso- 
lute truth  is  explained  in  contradiction  to 
his  dialectic,  the  cutting  loose  from  all  dog- 
matic methods,  and  thereby  the  revolution- 
ary side  becomes  smothered  under  the  dom- 
inating conservative.  And  what  can  be 
said  of  philosophical  knowledge  can  also 
be  said  of  historical  practice.  Mankind/ 
that  is,  in  the  person  of  Hegel,  has  arrived 
at  the  point  of  working  out  the  absolute 
idea,  and  must  also  practically  have  arrived 
so  far  as  to  make  the  absolute  idea  a  real- 
ity. The  practical  political  demands  of  the 
abstract  idea  upon  his  contemporaries  can- 
not, therefore,  be  stretched  too  far.  And  so 
we  find  as  the  conclusion  of  the  philosophy 


46  FEUEBBACH 

of  Eights  that  the  absolute  idea  shall  re- 
alize itself  in  that  limited  monarchy  which 
William  III.  so  persistently,  vainly  prom- 
ised to  his  subjects ;  therefore,  in  a  limited, 
moderate,  indirect  control  of  the  possessing 
classes,  suitable  to  the  dominating  small 
bourgeois  class  in  Germany  whereby,  in  ad- 
dition, the  necessity  to  us  of  the  existence 
of  the  nobility  is  shown  in  a  speculative 
fashion. 

The  essential  usefulness  of  the  system  is 
sufficient  to  explain  the  manufacture  of  a 
very  tame  political  conclusion  by  means  of 
a  thoroughly  revolutionary  method  of  rea- 
soning. The  special  form  of  this  conclu- 
sion springs  from  this,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
that  Hegel  was  a  German,  and,  as  in  the 
case  of  his  contemporary  Goethe,  he  was 
somewhat  of  a  philistine.  Goethe  and 
Hegel,  each  of  them  was  an  Olympian  Zeus 
in  his  own  sphere,  but  they  were  neither  of 
them  quite  free  from  German  philistinism. 

But  all  this  does  not  hinder  the  Hegelian 
system  from  playing  an  incomparably 
greater  role  than  any  earlier  system  and  by 
virtue  of  this  role  developing  riches  of 
thought  which  are  astounding  even  to-day. 


FEUEBBACH  47 

Phemonology  of  the  mind  (which  one  may 
parallel  with  embryology  and  palaeontol- 
ogy of  the  mind),  an  evolution  of  the  indi- 
vidual consciousness,  through  its  different 
steps,  expressed  as  a  brief  reproduction  of 
the  steps  through  which  the  consciousness 
of  man  has  historically  passed,  logic,  nat- 
ural philosophy,  mental  philosophy,  and 
the  latter  worked  out  separately  in  its  de- 
tailed historical  subdivisions,  philosophy 
of  history,  of  jurisprudence,  of  religion, 
history  of  philosophy,  esthetics,  etc.  Hegel 
labored  in  all  these  different  historical  fields 
to  discover  and  prove  the  thread  of  evolu- 
tion, and  as  he  was  not  only  a  creative 
genius,  but  also  a  man  of  encyclopedic 
learning,  he  was  thus,  from  every  point  of 
view,  the  maker  of  an  epoch.  It  is  self-evi- 
dent that  by  virtue  of  the  necessities  of  the 
"  System' '  he  must  very  often  take  refuge 
in  certain  forced  constructions,  about  which 
his  pigmy  opponents  make  such  an  ado 
even  at  the  present  time.  But  these  con- 
structions are  only  the  frames  and  scaffold- 
ings of  his  work ;  if  one  does  not  stop  un- 
necessarily at  these  but  presses  on  further 
into  the  building  one  will  find  uncounted 


48  FEUEEBACH 

treasures  which  hold  their  full  value  to-day. 
As  regards  all  philosophers,  their  system  is 
doomed  to  perish  and  for  this  reason,  be- 
cause it  emanates  from  an  imperishable  de- 
sire of  the  human  soul,  the  desire  to  abolish 
all  contradictions.  But  if  all  contradictions 
are  once  and  for  all  disposed  of, » we  have 
arrived  at  the  so-called  absolute  truth,  his- 
tory is  at  an  end,  and  yet  it  will  continue  to 
go  on,  although  there  is  nothing  further  left 
for  it  to  do— thus  a  newer  and  more  insolu- 
ble contradiction.  So  soon  as  we  have  once 
perceived— and  to  this  perception  no  one 
has  helped  us  more  than  Hegel  himself— 
that  the  task  thus  imposed  upon  philosophy 
signifies  nothing  different  than  the  task  that 
a  single  philosopher  shall  accomplish  what 
it  is  only  possible  for  the  entire  human 
race  to  accomplish,  in  the  course  of  its  pro- 
gressive development— as  soon  as  we  un- 
derstand that,  it  is  all  over  with  philosophy 
in  the  present  sense  of  the  word.  In  this 
way  one  discards  the  absolute  truth,  unat- 
tainable for  the  individual,  and  follows  in- 
stead the  relative  truths  attainable  by  way 
of  the  positive  sciences,  and  the  collection  of 
their  results  by  means  of  the  dialectic  mode 


FEUEBBACH  49 

of  thought.  With  Hegel  universal  philoso- 
phy comes  to  an  end,  on  the  one  hand,  be- 
cause he  comprehended  in  his  system  its 
entire  development  on  the  greatest  possible 
scale ;  on  the  other  hand,  becaxtae  he  showed 
us  the  way,  even  if  he  did  not  know  it  him- 
self, out  of  this  labyrinth  of  systems,  to  a 
real  positive  knowledge  of  the  world. 

One  may  imagine  what  an  immense  effect 
the  Hegelian  philosophy  produced  in  the 
philosophy-dyed  atmosphere  of  Germany. 
The  triumph  lasted  for  ten  years  and  by  no 
means  subsided  with  the  death  of  Hegel. 
On  the  contrary,  from  1830  to  1840  Hegel- 
ianismi  was  exclusively  supreme  and  had 
fastened  itself  upon  its  opponents  to  a 
greater  or  less  degree.  During  this  period 
Hegel's*  views,  consciously  or  unconscious- 
ly, penetrated  the  different  sciences,  and 
saturated  popular  literature  and  the  daily 
press  from  which  the  ordinary  so-called  cul- 
tured classes  derive  their  mental  pabulum* 
But  this  victory  down  the  whole  line  was 
only  preliminary  to  a  conflict  within  its  own 
ranks. 

The  entire  doctrine  of  Hegel  left,  as  we 
have  seen,  plenty  of  room  for  the  bringing 


50  FEUERBACH 

under  it  the  most  diverse  practical  opinions, 
and  the  practical,  in  the  then  theoretic  Ger- 
many, consisted  in  only  two  things  —  reli- 
gion and  politics.  He  who  laid  the  greatest 
stress  upon  the  Hegelian  system,  might  be 
moderately  conservative  in  both  these  re- 
spects, while  he  who  considered  the  dialec- 
tic method  of  the  greatest  importance  could 
belong  to  the  extreme  left  in  religions  and 
political  affairs.  Hegel  himself,  in  spite  of 
the  frequent  outbursts  of  revolutionary 
wrath  in  his  books,  was  inclined,  on  the 
whole,  to  the  conservative  side.  His  system, 
rather  than  his  method,  had  cost  him  the 
hard  thinking.  At  the  end  of  the  thirties, 
the  division  in  the  school  grew  greater  and 
greater.  The  left  wing,  the  so-called  Young 
Hegelians,  in  their  fight  with  the  pious  orth- 
odox, abandoned  little  by  little,  that  marked 
philosophical  reserve  regarding  the  burn- 
ing questions  of  the  day,  which  had  up  to 
that  time  secured  for  their  teachings  State 
toleration  and  even  protection,  and  as  in 
1840  orthodox  pietism  and  absolutist  feudal 
reaction  ascended  the  throne  with  Frederick 
William  IV.,  open  partisanship  became  una- 
voidable.    The  fight  was  still  maintained 


FEUERBACH  51 

with  philosophical  weapons,  but  no  longer 
along  abstract  philosophical  lines;  they 
went  straight  to  deny  the  dominant  religion 
and  the  existing  state,  and  although  in  the 
1 '  Deutschen  Jahrbuechern "  the  practical 
aims  were  still  put  forward  clothed  in  phi- 
losophical phraseology,  the  younger  Hege- 
lian school  threw  off  disguise  in  the"Rhein- 
ische  Zeitung, ' '  as  the  exponents  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  the  struggling  radicals,  and  used 
the  cloak  of  philosophy  only  to  deceive  the 
censorship. 

But  politics  were  at  that  time  a  very 
thorny  field,  and  so  the  main  fight  was  di- 
rected against  religion.  But  this  was  also, 
particularly  since  1840,  indirectly  a  politi- 
cal fight.  Strauss'  "Leben  Jesu,"  pub- 
lished in  1835,  had  given  the  first  cause  of 
offense.  The  theory  therein  developed  re- 
garding the  origin  of  the  gospel  myths 
Bruno  Bauer  later  dealt  with,  adding  the 
additional  proof  that  a  whole  series  of 
evangelical  stories  had  been  invented  by 
their  authors.  The  fight  between  these  two 
was  carried  on  under  a  philosophical  dis- 
guise, as  a  battle  of  mind  with  matter; 
the  question  whether  the  marvellous  stories 


52  FEUERBACH 

of  the  gospel  came  into  being  through  an 
unconscious  myth-creation  in  the  womb  of 
society,  or  whether  they  were  individually 
invented  by  the  evangelists  broadened  into 
the  question  whether  in  the  history  of  the 
race,  mind  or  matter  carried  the  real 
weight,  and  lastly  came  Stirner,  the 
prophet  of  modern  anarchism— Bakunine 
has  taken  very  much  from  him— and 
overtopped  the  sovereign  power  of  con- 
sciousness with  his  sovereign  power  of  the 
individual. 

We  do  not  follow  the  decomposition  of  the 
Hegelian  school  on  this  side  any  further. 
What  is  more  important  for  us  is  this :  The 
fmass  of  the  most  decided  young  Hegelians 
were  driven  back  upon  English-French  ma- 
terialism through  the  necessities  of  their 
\  fight  against  positive  religion.    Here  they 
\came  into  conflict  with  their  school  system. 
According  to  materialism,  nature  exists  as 
the  sole  reality,  it  exists  in  the  Hegelian 
system  only  as  the  alienation  of  the  abso- 
lute Idea,  as  it  were  a  degradation  of  the 
Idea ;  under  all  circumstances,  thought,  and 
its  thought-product,  the  Idea,  according  to 
this  view,  appears  as  the  original,  nature, 


FEUERBACH  53 

which  only  exists  through  the  condescension 
of  the  Idea  as  the  derived,  and  in  this  con- 
tradiction they  got  along  as  well  or  as  ill  as 
they  might. 

Then  came  Feuerbach's  "Wesen  des 
Christenthums. ' '  With  one  blow  it  cut  the 
contradiction,  in  that  it  placed  materialism 
on  the  throne  again  without  any  circumlocu- 
tion. Nature  exists  independently  of  all 
philosophies.  It  is  the  foundation  upon 
which  we,  ourselves  products  of  nature,  are 
built.  Outside  man  and  nature  nothing  ex- 
ists, and  the  higher  beings  which  our  reli- 
gious phantasies  have  created  are  only  the 
fantastic  reflections  of  our  individuality. 
The  cord  was  broken,  the  system  was  scat- 
tered and  destroyed,  the  contradiction,  since 
it  only  existed  in  the  imagination,  was 
solved.  One  must  himself  have  experienced 
the  delivering  power  of  this  book  to  get  a 
clear  idea  of  it.  The  enthusiasm  was  univer- 
sal, we  were  all  for  the  moment  followers  of  j 
Feuerbaeh.  How  enthusiastically  Marx j 
greeted  the  new  idea  and  how  much  he  was 
influenced  by  it,  in  spite  of  all  his  critical 
reservations,  one  may  read  in  the  "Holy 
Family." 


54     ,  FEUERBACH 

The  very  faults  of  the  book  contributed 
to  its  momentary  effect.  The  literary,  im- 
pressive, even  bombastic  style  secured  for 
it  a  very  large  public  and  was  a  constant 
relief  after  the  long  years  of  abstract  and 
abstruse  Hegelianism.  The  same  result  also 
proceeded  from  the  extravagant  glorifica- 
tion of  love,  which  in  comparison  with  the 
insufferable  sovereignty  of  pure  reason, 
found  an  excuse,  if  not  a  justification.  What 
we  must  not  forget  is,  that  just  on  these 
two  weaknesses  of  Feuerbach  "true  Social- 
ism' '  in  educated  Germany  fastened  itself 
like  a  spreading  plague  since  1844,  and 
set  literary  phrases  in  the  place  of  scientific 
knowledge,  the  freeing  of  mankind  by 
means  of  love  in  place  of  the  emancipation 
of  the  proletariat,  through  the  economic 
transformation  of  production,  in  short  lost 
itself  in  nauseous  fine  writing  and  in  sickly 
sentimentality,  of  the  type  of  which  class  of 
writers  was  Herr  Karl  Gruen. 

We  must  furthermore  not  forget  that 
though  the  Hegelian  school  was  destroyed 
the  Hegelian  philosophy  was  not  critically 
vanquished.  Strauss  and  Bauer  took  each  a 
side  and  engaged  in  polemics.    Feuerbach 


FEUEEBACH  55 

broke  through  the  system  and  threw  it  as  a 
whole  aside.  But  one  has  not  finished  with 
a  philosophy  by  simply  declaring  it  to  be 
false,  and  so  enormous  a  work  as  the  Hegel- 
ian philosophy  which  has  had  so  tremen- 
dous an  influence  upon  the  mental  develop- 
ment of  the  nation  did  not  allow  itself  to 
be  put  aside  peremptorily.  It  had  to  be 
destroyed  in  its  own  way,  which  means  in 
the  way  that  critically  destroys  its  form  but 
saves  the  new  acquisitions  to  knowledge  won 
by  it.  How  this  was  brought  about  we  shall 
see  below. 

But  for  the  moment,  the  Revolution  of 
1848  put  aside  all  philosophical  discussion 
just  as  unceremoniously  as  Feuerbach  laid 
aside  Hegel.  And  then  Feuerbach  was  him- 
self crowded  out. 


56  FEUERBACH 


II. 

The  great  foundation  question  of  all,  es- 
pecially new,  philosophies  is  connected  with 
the  relation  between  thinking  and  being. 
Since  very  early  times  when  men,  being  in 
complete  ignorance  respecting  their  own 
bodies,  and  stirred  by  apparitions,*  arrived 
at  the  idea  that  thought  and  sensation  were 
not  acts  of  their  own  bodies,  but  of  a  special 
soul  dwelling  in  the  body  and  deserting  it 
as  death,  ever  since  then  they  have  been 
obliged  to  give  thought  to  the  relations  of 
this  soul  to  the  outside  world.  If  it  betook 
itself  from  the  body  and  lived  on,  there 
was  no  reason  to  invent  another  death  for  it; 
thus  arose  the  conception  of  their  immor- 
tality, which,  at  that  evolutionary  stage,  did 
not  appear  as  a  consolation,  but  as  fate, 
against  which  a  man  cannot  strive,  and 
often  enough,  as  among  the  Greeks,  as  a 
positive  misfortune.    Not   religious   desire 

♦To  this  very  day  the  idea  is  prevalent  among  savages 
and  barbarians  that  the  human  forms  appearing  in  our 
dreams  are  souls  which  temporarily  leave  the  body,  and 
that,  therefore,  the  real  man  becomes  liable  for  the  deeds 
done  to  the  dreamer  by  his  dream  appearance.  So  Im- 
thurm,  for  example,  found  it  in  1884  among  the  Indians 
in  Guiana. 


FEUEEBACH  57 

for  consolation  but  uncertainty  arising 
from  a  similar  universal  ignorance  of  what 
to  associate  with  the  soul  when  once  it  was 
acknowledged,  after  the  death  of  the  body, 
led  universally  to  the  tedious  idea  of  per- 
sonal immortality.  Just  in  a  similar  fash- 
ion the  first  gods  arose,  through  the  person- 
ification of  the  forces  of  nature,  and  these 
in  the  further  development  of  the  religions 
acquired  greater  and  greater  supernatural 
force,  until  by  a  natural  process  of  abstrac- 
tion, I  might  say  of  distillation,  from  the 
many  more  or  less  limited  and  mutually  lim- 
iting gods,  in  the  course  of  spiritual  devel- 
opment, at  last  the  idea  of  the  one  all  em- 
bracing god  of  the  monotheistic  religions 
took  its  place  in  the  minds  of  men. 

The  question  of  the  relation  of  thinking 
to  being,  of  the  relation  of  the  spirit  to  na- 
ture, the  highest  question  of  universal  phil- 
osophy, has  therefore,  no  less  than  all  re- 
ligion, its  roots  in  the  limited  and  ignor- 
ant ideas  of  the  condition  of  savagery.  It 
could  first  be  understood,  and  its  full  sig- 
nificance could  first  be  grasped,  when  man- 
kind awoke  from  the  long  winter  sleep  of 
Christian  Middle  Ages.  The  question  of  the 


58  FEUERBACH 

relation  of  thought  to  existence,  a  question 
which  had  also  played  a  great  role  in  the 
scholasticism  of  the  Middle  Ages,  the  ques- 
tion what  is  at  the  beginning  spirit  or  na- 
ture, this  question  was  in  spite  of  the  church 
now  cut  down  to  this :  ' '  Has  God  made 
the  world  or  is  the  world  from  eternity? 

As  this  question  was  answered  this  way 
or  that  the  philosophers  were  divided  into 
ftwo  great  camps.  The  one  party  which 
placed  the  origin  of  the  spirit  before  that  of 
nature,  and  therefore  in  the  last  instance 
acepted  creation,  in  some  form  or  other— 
and  this  creation,  is  often  according  to  the 
philosophers,  according  to  Hegel  for  ex- 
ample, still  more  odd  and  impossible  than 
in  Christianity— made  the  camp  of  idealism. 
The  others,  who  recognized  nature  as  the 
source,  belong  to  the  various  schools  of  ma- 
terialism. 

The  two  expressions  signify  something 
different  from  this.  Idealism  and  materi- 
alism, originally  not  used  in  any  other  sense, 
are  not  here  employed  in  any  other  sense. 
We  shall  see  what  confusion  arises  when 
one  tries  to  force  another  signification  into 
them. 


FEUERBACH  59 

The  question  of  the  relationship  of  think-  1 
ing  and  being  has  another  side ;  in  what  re- 
lation do  our  thoughts  with  regard  to  the 
world  surrounding  us  stand  to  this  world 
itself?  Ifcjcfur  thought  in  a  position  to  rec- 
ognize the  real  world  I  Can  we,  in  our  ideas 
and  notion  of  the  real  world,  produce  a  cor- 
rect reflection  of  the  reality !  This  question 
is  called  in  philosophical  language  the  ques- 
tion of  the  identity  of  thinking  and  being, 
and  is  affirmed  by  the  great  majority 
of  philosophers.  According  to  Hegel,  for 
example,  its  affirmation  is  self-evident,  for 
that  which  we  know  in  the  actual  world  is 
its  content,  according  to  our  thought,  that 
which  compels  the  world  to  a  progressive 
realization  as  it  were  of  the  absolute  Idea, 
which  absolute  idea  has  existed  somewhere, 
unattached  from  the  world  and  before  the 
world;  and  that  thought  can  recognize  a 
content  which  is  already  a  thought  content 
herein,  from  the  beginning,  appears  self- 
evident.  It  is  also  evident  that  what  is  hero 
to  be  proved  is  already  hidden  in  the  hy- 
pothesis. But  that  does  not  hinder  Hegel, 
by  any  means,  from  drawing  the  further 
onclusion  from  his  proof  of  the  identity  of 


cc 


60  FEUERBACH 

thought  and  existence  that  his  philosophy, 
because  correct  for  his  thought,  is,  there- 
fore, the  only  correct  one,  and  that  the  iden- 
tity of  thought  and  existence  must  show  it- 
self in  this,  that  mankind  should  forthwith 
translate  his  philosophy  from  theory  to 
practice  and  the  whole  world  shift  itself  to 
a  Hegelian  base.  This  is  an  illusion  which 
he  shares  alike  with  all  philosophers. 

In  addition  there  is  still  another  class  of 
philosophers,  those  who  dispute  the  possi- 
bility of  a  perception  of  the  universe  or  at 
least  of  an  exhaustive  perception.  To  them 
belong,  among  the  moderns,  Hume  and 
Kant,  and  they  have  played  a  very  distin- 
guished role  in  the  evolution  of  philosophy. 
This  point  of  view  has  been  now  refuted  by 
Hegel,  as  far  as  possible,  from  the  idealistic 
standpoint.  The  materialistic  additions 
made  by  Feuerbach  are  more  ingenious  than 
deep.  The  most  destructive  refutation  of 
this  as  of  all  other  fixed  philosophic  ideas 
is  actual  result,  namely  experiment  and  in- 
dustry. If  we  can  prove  the  correctness  of 
our  idea  of  an  actual  occurrence  by  experi- 
encing it  ourselves  and  producing  it  from 
its  constituent  elements,  and  using  it  for  our 


FEUERBACH  61 

own  purposes  into  the  bargain,  the  Kant- 
ian phrase  "Ding  an  Sich"  (thing  in  it- 
self) ceases  to  have  any  meaning.  The 
chemical  substances  which  go  to  form  the 
bodies  of  plants  and  animals  remained  just 
such  "Dinge  an  Sich"  until  organic  chem- 
istry undertook  to  show  them  one  after  the 
other,  whereupon  the  thing  in  itself  became 
a  thing  for  us,  as  the  coloring  matter  in  the 
roots  of  madder,  alizarin,  which  we  no 
longer  allow  to  grow  in  the  roots  of  the  mad- 
der in  the  field,  but  make  much  more  cheap- 
ly and  simply  from  coal  tar.  The  Coperni- 
can  system  was  for  three  hundred  years  a 
hypothesis,  with  a  hundred,  a  thousand,  or 
ten  thousand  chances  in  its  favor,  but  still 
a  hypothesis.  But  when  Leverrier  by  means 
of  the  data  of  this  system  not  only  discov- 
ered the  existence  of  a  certain  unknown 
planet,  but  even  calculated  the  position  in 
the  heavens  which  this  planet  must  neces- 
sarily occupy,  and  when  Galles  really  found 
this  planet,  then  the  Copernican  system  was 
proved.  If,  nevertheless,  the  resurrection 
of  the  Kantian  idea  in  Germany  is  being 
tried  by  the  Neo-Kantians,  and  of  that  of 
Hume  in  England  (where  they  never  died), 


62  FEUERBACH 

by  the  agnostics,  that  is,  in  the  face  of  the 
long  past  theoretical  and  practical  refuta- 
tion of  these  doctrines,  scientifically,  a  step 
backwards,  and  practically,  merely  the  ac- 
ceptance of  materialism  in  a  shame-faced 
way,  clandestinely,  and  the  denial  of  it  be- 
fore the  world. 

But  the  philosophers  were  during  this 
long  period  from  Descartes  to  Hegel  and 
from  Hobbes  to  Feuerbach  by  no  means,  as 
they  thought,  impelled  solely  by  the  force  of 
pure  reason.  On  the  contrary,  what  really 
impelled  them  was,  in  particular,  the  strong 
and  ever  quicker  conquering  step  of  natural 
science  and  industry.  Among  the  material- 
ists this  very  quickly  showed  itself  on  the 
surface,  but  the  idealistic  systems  filled 
themselves  more  and  more  with  materialis- 
tic content  and  bought  to  reconcile  the  an- 
tagonism between  spirit  and  matter  by 
means  of  pantheism,  so  that  finally  the 
Hegelian  system  represented  merely  a  ma- 
terialism turned  upside  down,  according  to 
idealistic  method  and  content. 

Of  course  Starcke  in  his  ' i  Characteristics 
of  Feuerbach"  enquired  into  the  funda- 
mental question  of  the  relations  of  thinking 


FEUERBACH  63 

and  being.  After  a  short  introduction  in 
which  the  ideas  of  preceding  philosophers, 
particularly  since  Kant,  are  portrayed  in 
unnecessarily  heavy  philosophical  language 
and  in  which  Hegel,  owing  to  a  too  formal 
insistence  on  certain  parts  of  his  work  does 
not  receive  due  credit,  there  follows  a  co- 
pious description  of  the  development  of  the 
metaphysics  of  Feuerbach,  as  shown  in  the 
course  of  the  recognized  writings  of  this 
•philosopher.  This  description  is  indus- 
triously and  carefully  elaborated,  and,  like 
the  whole  book,  is  overballasted  with,  not 
always  unavoidable,  philosophical  expres- 
sions, which  is  all  the  more  annoying  in  that 
the  writer  does  not  hold  to  the  vocabulary  of 
one  and  the  same  school  nor  even  of  Feuer- 
bach himself,  but  mixes  up  expressions  of 
very  different  schools,  and  especially  of  the 
present  epidemic  of  schools  calling  them- 
selves philosophical. 

The  evolution  of  Feuerbach  is  that  of  a 
Hegelian  to  materialism— not  of  an  ortho- 
dox Hegelian,  indeed— an  evolution  which 
from  a  definite  point  makes  a  complete 
breach  with  the  idealistic  system  of  his  pre- 
decessor.  With  irresistible  iforce  he  brings 


64  FEUERBACH 

himself  to  the  view  that  the  Hegelian  idea  of 
the  existence  of  the  absolute  idea  before  the 
world,  the  pre-existence  of  the  logical  cate- 
gories before  the  universe  came  into  being, 
is  nothing  else  than  the  fantastical  survival 
of  the  belief  in  the  existence  of  an  extra- 
mundane  creator;  that  the  material,  sensi- 
ble, actual  world,  to  which  we  ourselves  be- 
long, is  the  only  reality,  and  that  our  con- 
sciousness and  thought,  however  supernat- 
ural they  may  seem,  are  only  evidences  of  a 
material  bodily  organ,  the  brain.  Matter 
is  not  a  product  of  mind,  but  mind  it- 
self is  only  the  highest  product  of  matter. 
This  is,  of  course,  pure  materialism.  When 
he  reached  this  point  Feuerbach  came  to  a 
standstill.  He  cannot  overcome  ordinary 
philosophical  prejudice,  prejudice  not 
against  the  thing,  but  against  the  name  ma- 
terialism. He  says  "Materialism  is  for  me 
the  foundation  of  the  building  of  the  being 
and  knowledge  of  man,  but  it  is  not  for  me 
what  it  is  for  the  physiologists  in  the  narrow 
sense,  as  Moleschott,  for  example,  since  nec- 
essarily from  their  standpoint  it  is  the  build- 
ing itself.  Backwards,  I  am  in  accord  with 
the  materialists  but  not  forwards.' ' 


FEUERBACH  65 

Feuerbach  here  confuses  materialism, 
which  is  a  philosophy  of  the  universe  de- 
pendent upon  a  certain  comprehension  of  the 
relations  between  matter  and  spirit,  with  the 
special  forms  in  which  this  philosophy  ap- 
peared at  a  certain  historical  stage— namely 
in  the  eighteenth  century.  More  than  that 
he  confuses  it  with  the  shallow  and  vul- 
garized form  in  which  the  materialism  of 
the  eighteenth  century  exists  today,  in  the 
minds  of  naturalists  and  physicians,  and 
was  popularized  during  a  period  of  fifty 
years  in  the  writings  of  Buechner,  Vogt  and 
Moleschott.  But  as  idealism  has  passed 
through  a  series  of  evolutionary  develop- 
ments, so  also  has  materialism— with  each 
epoch-making  discovery  in  the  department 
of  natural  science  it  has  been  obliged  to 
change  its  form ;  since  then,  history  also,  be- 
ing subjected  to  the  materialistic  method 
of  treatment,  shows  itself  as  a  new  road  of 
progress. 

The  materialism  of  the  preceding  century 
was  overwhelmingly  mechanical,  because  at 
that  time  of  all  the  natural  sciences,  mechan- 
ics, and  indeed,  only  the  mechanics  of  the 
celestial   and  terrestrial  fixed  bodies,   the 


) 


GG  FEUERBACH 

mechanics  of  gravity,  in  short,  had  reached 
any  definite  conclusions.  Chemistry  existed 
at  first  only  in  a  childish,  phlogistic  form. 
Biology  still  lay  in  swaddling  clothes;  the 
organism  of  plants  and  animals  was  ex- 
amined only  in  a  very  cursory  manner,  and 
was  explained  upon  purely  mechanical 
grounds ;  just  as  an  animal  was  to  Descartes 
nothing  but  a  machine,  so  was  man  to  the 
materialists  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The 
exclusive  application  of  the  measure  of  me- 
chanics to  processes  which  are  of  chemical 
and  organic  nature  and  by  which,  it  is  true, 
the  laws  of  mechanics  are  also  manifested, 
but  are  pushed  into  the  background  by  other 
higher  laws,  this  application  is  the  cause  of 
the  peculiar,  but,  considering  the  times,  un- 
avoidable, narrowmindedness  of  the  French 
materialism. 

The  second  special  limitation  of  this  ma- 
terialism lies  in  its  incapacity  to  represent 
the  universe  as  a  process,  as  one  form  of 
matter  assumed  in  the  course  of  evolution- 
ary development.  This  limitation  corre- 
sponded with  the  natural  science  of  the  time 
and  the  metaphysic  coincident  therewith, 
that  is  the  anti-dialectic  methods  of  the  phil- 


FEUERBACH  67 

osophers.  Nature,  as  was  known,  was  in 
constant  motion,  but  this  motion,  according 
to  the  universally  accepted  ideas,  turned 
eternally  in  a  circle,  and  therefore— nexer 
moved  from  the  spot,  and  produced  the  same 
results  over  and  over  again.  This  idea  was 
at  that  time  inevitable.  The  Kantian  theory 
of  the  origin  of  the  solar  system  was  at  first 
exhibited  and  considered  as  a  mere  curiosity. 
The  history  of  the  development  of  the  earth- 
geology  was  still  unknown,  and  the  idea  that 
the  living  natural  objects  of  to-day  are  the 
result  of  a  long  process  of  development  from 
the  simple  to  the  complex  could  not  be 
scientifically  established  at  that  time.  This 
anti-historical  comprehension  of  nature  was, 
therefore,  inevitable.  We  cannot  reproach 
the  philosophers  of  the  eighteenth  century 
with  this,  as  the  same  thing  is  also  found 
in  Hegel.  According  to  him,  nature  is  the 
mere  outward  form  of  the  Idea,  capable  of 
no  progress  as  regards  time,  but  merely  of 
an  extension  of  its  manifoldness  in 
space,  so  that  it  displays  all  the  stages  of 
development  comprised  in  it  at  one  and  the 
same  time  together,  and  is  condemned  to  a 
repetition  of  the  same  processes.    And  this 


68  FEUERBACH 

absurdity  of  a  progress  in  space  but  outside 
of  time— the  fundamental  condition  of  all 
progress— Hegel  loads  upon  nature,  just  at 
the  very  time  when  geology,  embryology, 
the  physiology  of  plants  and  animals,  and 
inorganic  chemistry,  were  being  built  up, 
and  when  above  all  genial  prophecies  of  the 
later  evolution  theory  appeared  at  the  very 
threshold  of  these  new  sciences  (e.  g.,  Goethe 
and  Lamark),  but  the  system  so  required  it, 
and  the  method,  for  love  of  the  system, 
had  to  prove  untrue  to  itself. 

This  unhistoric  conception  had  its  effects 
also  in  the  domain  of  history.  Here  the 
fight  against  the  remnants  of  the  Middle 
Ages  kept  the  outlook  limited.  The  Middle 
Ages  were  reckoned  as  a  mere  interruption 
of  history  by  a  thousand  years  of  barbarism. 
The  great  advances  of  the  Middle  Ages— the 
broadening  of  European  learning,  the  bring- 
ing into  existence  of  great  nations,  which 
arose,  one  after  the  other,  and  finally  the 
enormous  technical  advances  of  the  four- 
teenth and  fifteenth  centuries— all  this  no 
one  saw.  Consequently  a  rational  view  of 
the  great  historic  development  was  ren- 
dered impossible,  and  history  served  prin- 


FEUERBACH  69 

cipally  as  a  collection  of  examples  and  illus- 
trations for  the  use  of  philosophers. 

The  vulgarizing  peddlers  who  during  the 
fifties  occupied  themselves  with  materialism 
in  Germany  did  not  by  any  means  escape 
the  limitations  of  their  doctrine.  All  the 
advances  made  in  science  served  them  only 
as  new  grounds  of  proof  against  the  exist- 
ence of  the  Creator,  and  indeed  it  was  far 
beyond  their  trade  to  develop  the  theory  any 
further.  Idealism  was  at  the  end  of  its 
tether  and  was  smitten  with  death  by  the 
Revolution  of  1848.  Yet  it  had  the  satisfac- 
tion that  materialism  sank  still  lower.  Feu- 
erbach  was  decidedly  right  when  he  refused 
to  take  the  responsibility  of  this  material- 
ism, only  he  had  no  business  to  confound 
the  teachings  of  the  itinerant  spouters  with 
materialism  in  general. 

However,  we  must  here  remark  two  differ- 
ent things.  During  the  life  of  Feuerbach 
science  was  still  in  that  state  of  violent  fer- 
mentation which  has  only  comparatively 
cleared  during  the  last  fifteen  years;  new 
material  of  knowledge  was  furnished  in  a 
hitherto  unheard  of  measure  but  the  fixing 
of  interrelations,  and  therewith  of  order,  in 


70  FEUERBACH 

the  chaos  of  overwhelming  discoveries  was 
rendered  possible  quite  lately  for  the  first 
time.  True,  Feuerbach  had  lived  to  see  the 
three  distinctive  discoveries  —  that  of  the 
cell,  the  transformation  of  energy  and  the 
evolution3  theory  acknowledged  since  the 
time  of  Darwin.  But  how  could  the  solitary 
country-dwelling  philosopher  appreciate  at 
their  full  value  discoveries  which  natural- 
ists themselves  at  that  time  in  part  contest- 
ed and  partly  did  not  understand  how  to 
avail  themselves  of  sufficiently?  The  dis- 
grace falls  solely  upon  the  miserable  condi- 
tions in  Germany  owing  to  which  the 
chairs  of  philosophy  were  filled  by  pettifog- 
ging eclectic  pedants,  while  Feuerbach,  who 
towered  high  above  them  all,  had  to  rusti- 
cate and  grow  sour  in  a  little  village.  It  is 
therefore  no  shame  to  Feuerbach  that  he 
never  grasped  the  natural  evolutionary 
philosophy  which  became  possible  with  the 
passing  away  of  the  partial  views  of 
French  materialism. 

In  the  second  place,  Feuerbach  held  quite 
correctly  that  scientific  materialism  is  the 
foundation  of  the  building  of  human  knowl- 
edge but  it  is  not  the  building  itself.    For 


FEUERBACH  71 

we  live  not  only  in  nature  but  in  human  so-  | 
ciety,  and  this  has  its  theory  of  development 
and  its  science  no  less  than  nature.  It  was 
necessary,  therefore,  to  bring  the  science  of  j 
society,  that  is  the  so-called  historical  and 
philosophical  sciences,  into  harmony  with 
the  materialistic  foundations  and  to  rebuild 
upon  them.  But  this  was  not  granted  to 
Feuerbach.  Here  he  stuck,  in  spite  of  the 
"foundations,"  held  in  the  confining  bonds 
of  idealism,  and  to  this  he  testified  in  the 
words  ' '  Backwards  I  am  with  the  material- 
ists, but  not  forwards.  ' '  But  Feuerbach  him- 
self did  not  go  forward  in  his  views  of  hu- 
man society  from  his  standpoint  of  1840  and 
1844,  chiefly  owing  to  that  loneliness 
which  compelled  him  to  think  everything 
out  by  himself,  instead  of  in  friendly 
and  hostile  conflict  with  other  men 
of  his  calibre,  although  of  all  philosophers 
he  was  the  fondest  of  intercourse  with  his 
fellows.  We  shall  see  later  on  how  he 
thusi  remained  an  idealist.  Here  we 
can  only  call  attention  to  the  fact  that 
Starcke  sought  the  idealism  of  Feuerbach  in 
the  wrong  place.  "Feuerbach  is  an  idealist; 
he  believes  in  the  advance  of  mankind' '  (p. 


72  FEUERBACH 

19).  "  The  foundations,  the  underpinning 
of  the  whole,  is  therefore  nothing  less  than 
idealism.  Realism  is  for  us  nothing  more 
than  a  protection  against  error  while  we 
follow  our  own  idealistic  tendencies.  Are  not 
compassion,  love  and  enthusiasm  for  truth 
and  justice  ideal  forces  V 

In  the  first  place,  idealism  is  here  defined 
as  nothing  but  the  following  of  ideal  aims. 
But  these  have  necessarily  to  do  principally 
with  the  idealism  of  Kant  and  his  "Cate- 
gorical Imperative."  But  Kant  himself 
called  his  philosophy  ' 6  transcendental  ideal- 
ism," by  no  means,  because  he  deals  therein 
with  moral  ideals,  but  on  quite  other 
grounds,  as  Starcke  will  remember. 

The  superstition  that  philosophical  ideal- 
ism pivots  around  a  belief  in  moral,  that  is 
in  social  ideals,  arose  with  the  German  non- 
philosophical  Philistine,  who  commits  to 
memory  the  few  philosophical  morsels 
which  he  finds  in  Schiller's  poems.  No- 
body has  criticised  more  severely  the  feeble 
Categorical  Imperative  of  Kant— feeble  be- 
cause it  demands  the  impossible  and  there- 
fore never  attains  to  any  reality— nobody 
has  ridiculed  more  cruelly  the  Philistine 


FEUERBACH  73 

sentimentality  imparted  by  Schiller,  because 
of  its  unrealizable  ideals,  than  just  the  ideal- 
ist par  excellence,  Hegel.  (See  e.  g.  Phe- 
nomenology.) 

In  the  second  place,  it  cannot  be  avoided 
that  all  human  sensations  pass  through  the 
brain— even  eating  and  drinking  which  are 
commenced  consequent  upon  hunger  and 
thirst  felt  by  the  brain  and  ended  in  con- 
sequence of  sensations  of  satisfaction  simi- 
larly experienced  by  the  brain.  The  reali- 
ties of  the  outer  world  impress  themselves 
upon  the  brain  of  man,  reflect  themselves 
there,  as  feelings,  thoughts,  impulses,  voli- 
tions, in  short,  as  ideal  tendencies,  and  in 
this  form  become  ideal  forces.  If  the  cir- 
cumstance that  this  man  follows  ideal  ten- 
dencies at  all,  and  admits  that  ideal  forces 
exercise  an  influence  over  him,  if  this  makes 
an  idealist  of  him,  every  normally  develop- 
ed man  is  in  some  sense  a  born  idealist,  and 
under  such  circumstances  how  can  mate- 
rialists exist? 

In  the  third  place,  the  conviction  that  hu- 
manity, at  least  at  present,  as  a  whole,  pro- 
gresses, has  absolutely  nothing  to  do  with 
the  antagonism  between  materialism  and 


74  FEUERBACH 

idealism.  The  French  materialists  had  this 
conviction,  to  a  fanatical  degree,  no  less  than 
the  deists,  Voltaire  and  Rousseau,  and  made 
the  greatest  personal  sacrifices  for  it.  If 
anybody  ever  concentrated  his  whole  life  to 
the  enthusiasm  for  truth  and  justice,  taking 
the  words  in  a  moral  sense,  it  was  Diderot, 
for  example.  Therefore,  since  Starcke  has 
explained  all  this  as  idealism,  it  simply 
proves  that  the  word  materialism  has  lost 
all  significance  for  him,  as  has  also  the  an- 
tagonism between  the  aims  of  the  two. 

The  fact  is  that  Starcke  here  makes  an  un- 
pardonable concession  to  the  prejudices  of 
the  Philistines  caused  by  the  long  contin- 
ued slanders  of  the  clergy  against  the  word 
materialism,  even  if  without  consciously  do- 
ing so.  The  Philistine  understands  by  the 
word  materialism,  gluttony,  drunkenness, 
carnal  lust,  and  fraudulent  speculation,  in 
short  all  the  enormous  vices  to  which  he 
himself  is  secretly  addicted,  and  by  the  word 
idealism  he  understands  the  belief  in  virtue, 
universal  humanitarianism,  and  a  better 
world  as  a  whole,  of  which  he  boasts  before 
others,  and  in  which  he  himself  at  the  very 
most  believes,  only  as  long  as  he  must  endure 


FEUERBACH  75 

the  blues  which  follow  necessarily  from  his 
customary  "materialistic"  excesses,  and  so 
sings  his  favorite  song— "What  is  man?— 
Half  beast,  half  angel. '  \ 

As  for  the  rest,  Starcke  takes  great  pains 
to  defend  Feuerbach  against  the  attacks  and 
doctrines  of  those  collegians  who  plume 
themselves  in  Germany  as  philosophers  now- 
a-days.  It  is  true  that  this  is  a  matter  of  im- 
portance to  those  people  who  take  an  inter- 
est in  the  afterbirth  of  the  German  classic 
philosophy,  to  Starcke  himself  this  might 
appear  necessary.  We  spare  the  reader  this, 
however. 


76  FEUERBACH 


III. 


The  distinct  idealism  of  Feuerbach  is  evi- 
dent directly  we  come  to  his  philosophy  of 
;  religion  and  ethics.    He  does  not  wish  to 
j  abolish  religion  by  any  means ;  he  wants  to 
perfect  it.     Philosophy  itself  will  be  ab- 
sorbed in  religion.    ' i  The  periods  of  human 
progress  are  only  distinguishable  by  relig- 
ious changes.    There  is  only  a  real  historical 
progress  where  it  enters  the  hearts  of  men. 
The  heart  is  not  a  place  for  religion,  so  that 
it  should  be  in  the  heart,  it  is  the  very  be- 
ang  of  religion.' '    Religion  is,  according  to 
f  Feuerbach,  a  matter  of  the  feelings— the 
j  feelings  of  love  between  man  and  man  which 
up  to  now  sought  its  realization  in  the  fan- 
tastic reflected  image  of  the  reality— in  the 
interposition  through  one  or  more  gods  of 
the  fantastic  reflections  of  human  qualities 
—but  now  by  means  of  love  between  "ego" 
1  and  "tu"  finds  itself  directly  and  without 
any  intermediary.    According  to  Feuerbach 
love  between  the  sexes  is,  if  not  the  highest 
form,  at  least  one  of  the  highest  forms,  of 
the  practice  of  his  new  religion. 


FEUEEBACH  77 

Now,  feelings  of  affection  between  man 
and  man,  and  particularly  between  members 
of  the  two  sexes,  have  existed  as  long  as 
mankind  has.  Love  between  the  sexes  has 
been  cultivated  especially  during  the  last 
eighteen  hundred  years  and  has  won  a 
place  which  has  made  it,  in  this  period,  a 
compulsory  motive  for  all  poetry.  The  ex- 
isting positive  religions  have  limited  them- 
selves in  this  matter  to  the  bestowal  of  com- 
plete consecration  upon  the  State  regulation 
of  sexual  love,  and  might  completely  disap- 
pear tomorrow  without  the  least  difference 
taking  place  in  the  matter  of  love  and 
friendship.  Thus  the  Christian  religion  in 
France  was,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  so  com- 
pletely overthrown  between  the  years  1793 
and  1798,  that  Napoleon  himself  could  not 
re-introduce  it  without  opposition  and  diffi- 
culty, without,  in  the  interval,  any  desire  for 
a  substitute,  in  Feuerbaeh's  sense,  making 
itself  felt. 

Feuerbach  's  idealism  consists  in  this,  that 
he  does  not  simply  take  for  granted  the  mu- 
tual and  reciprocal  feelings  of  men  for  one 
another  such  as  sexual  love,  friendship,  com- 
passion, self-sacrifice,  etc.,  but  declares  that 


78  FEUERBACH 

they  would  come  to  their  full  realization  for 
the  first  time  as  soon  as  they  were  conse- 
crated under  the  name  of  religion.  The  main 
fact  for  him  is  not  that  these  purely  human 
relations  exist,  but  that  they  will  be  conceiv- 
ed of  as  the  new  true  religion.  They  will 
be  fully  realized  for  the  first  time  if  they 
are  stamped  as  religions.  Religion  is  de- 
rived from  "religare"  and  means  originally 

i i  l  fastening. ' '  Therefore,  every  bond  be- 
tween men  is  religion.  Such  etymological 
artifices  are  the  last  resort  of  the  idealistic 
philosophy.  Not  what  the  word  means  ac- 
cording to  the  historical  development  of  its 
true  significance,  but  what  it  should  mean 
according  to  its  derivation  is  what  counts, 
and  so  sex-love  and  the  intercourse  between 

ithe  sexes  is  consecrated  as  a  " religion' ' 
only  so  that  the  word  religion,  which  is  dear 

\  to  the  mind  of  the  idealist,  shall  not  vanish 

'  from  the  language.  The  Parisian  reformer 
of  the  stripe  of  Louis  Blanc  used  to  speak 
just  in  the  same  way  in  the  forties,  for  they 
could  only  conceive  of  a  man  without  relig- 
ion as  a  monster,  and  used  to  say  to  us 
"Atheism,  then,  is  your  religion.' ' 
If  Feuerbach  wants  to  place  true  religion 


FEUEEBACH  79 

upon  the  basis  of  real  materialistic  philos- 
ophy, that  would  be  just  the  same  as  con- 
ceiving of  modern  chemistry  as  true  al- 
chemy. If  religion  can  exist  without  its 
God  then  alchemy  can  exist  without  its  phi- 
losopher 's  stone.  There  exists,  by  the  way,  a 
very  close  connection  between  alchemy  and 
religion.  The  philosopher's  stone  has  many 
properties  of  the  old  gods,  and  the  Egyp- 
tian-Greek alchemists  of  the  first  two  cen- 
turies of  our  era  have  had  their  hands  in  the 
development  of  Christian  doctrines,  as 
Kopp  and  Berthelot  prove. 

Feuerbach's  declaration  that  the  periods 
of  man's  development  are  only  differen- 
tiated through  changes  in  religion  is  false. 
Great  historical  points  of  departure  are  co- 
incident with  religious  changes  only  as  far 
as  the  three  world-religions  which  exist  up 
to  the  present  are  concerned— Buddhism, 
Christianity  and  Islam.  The  old  tribal  and 
national  religions  originating  in  nature 
were  not  propagandist  and  lost  all  power  of 
resistance  as  soon  as  the  independence  of 
the  tribe  and  people  was  destroyed.  Among 
the  Germans  simple  contact  with  the  decay- 
ing Roman  Empire  and  the  Christian  world- 


80  FEUERBACH 

religion  springing  from  it  and  suitable  to 
its  economic,  political  and  ideal  circum- 
stances, was  sufficient.  In  the  first  place, 
as  regards  these  more  or  less  artificial 
world-religions,  particularly  in  the  cases  of 
Christianity  and  Mohammedanism,  we  find 
that  the  more  universal  historical  move- 
ments will  take  on  a  religious  stamp,  and  as 
'far  as  concerns  Christianity  in  particular, 
the  stamp  of  the  religion  affecting  revolu- 
tionary movements  of  universal  significance 
stopped  short  at  the  commencement  of  the 
fight  of  the  bourgeois  for  emancipation 
from  the  thirteenth  to  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury, and  showed  itself  not  as  Feuerbaeh 
declares  in  the  hearts  of  men  and  the  thirst 
for  religion,  but  in  the  entire  earlier  history 
of  the  Middle  Ages  which  knew  no  other 
form  of  idealism  than  religion  and  theology. 
But  as  the  bourgeoisie  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury was  sufficiently  strong  to  have  its  own 
ideology  suitable  to  its  own  standpoint,  it 
forthwith  made  its  great  and  final  revolu- 
tion, the  French,  by  means  of  an  appeal  ex- 
clusively to  juristic  and  political  ideals,  and 
troubled  itself  with  religion  only  so  far  as 
it  stood  in  its  way.    It  never  occurred  to  it 


FEUERBACH  81 

to  establish  a  new  religion  in  place  of  the 
old  one;  everybody  knows  what  a  mess 
Robespierre  made  of  the  attempt. 

The  possibility  of  a  purely  humane  sen- 
timent in  intercourse  with  other  men  is  with 
us  today  exceedingly  impeded  through  the 
society  founded  on  class  antagonism  and 
class  supremacy  in  which  we  must  move. 
We  have  no  need  to  trouble  ourselves  about 
sanctifying  these  sentiments  by  means  of  a 
new  religion.  And  just  as  the  circumstances 
of  the  great  historical  class-fight  have  been 
obscured  by  the  current  historians,  partic- 
ularly in  Germany,  so  in  the  same  way  the 
understanding  of  the  great  historical  class- 
conflicts  is  sufficiently  obscured  by  the  pres- 
ent-day manner  of  writing  history,  without 
our  needing  to  change  these  conflicts  into 
a  mere  appendix  of  ecclesiastical  history. 
Here  it  is  evident  how  far  we  in  our  day  are 
away  from  Feuerbach.  His  most  beautiful 
passages  in  praise  of  the  new  religion  of 
love  are  today  unreadable. 

The  only  religion  which  Feuerbach  exam- 
ined closely  is  Christianity,  the  universal 
religion  of  the  western  world  which  is 
founded  upon  monotheism.    He  proves  that 


82  FEUERBACH 

the  Christian  God  is  only  the  fantastic  re- 
flection, the  reflected  image  of  man.  But 
that  God  is  himself  the  product  of  a  lengthy 
process  of  abstraction,  the  concentrated 
quintessence  of  the  earlier  tribal  and  na- 
tional gods.  [And  man  also  whose  reflection  jy£ 
that  God  is,  is  not  a  real  man,  but  is  like- 
wise the  quintessence  of  many  real  men,  the 
abstract  human,  and  therefore  himself  again 
the  creature  of  thought]  The  same  Feuer- 
bach  who  on  each  page  preaches  sensation, 
diving  into  the  concrete,  the  real,  becomes 
thoroughly  abstract  as  soon  as  he  begins  to 
talk  of  more  than  mere  sensual  intercourse 
between  human  beings. 

Of  this  relationship  only  one  side  appeals 
to  him,  the  moral,  and  Feuerbach's  aston- 
ishing lack  of  resources  as  compared  with 
Hegel  is  striking.  The  ethic  or  rather  moral 
doctrine  of  the  latter,  is  the  Philosophy  of 
Right  and  embraces:  1,  Abstract  Right;  2, 
Morality;  3,  Moral  Conduct,  under  which 
are  again  comprised :  the  family,  bourgeois, 
society,  and  the  State.  As  the  form  is  here 
idealistic,  the  content  is  realistic.  The  en- 
tire scope  of  law,  economy,  politics,  is  there- 
in, besides  ethics.  With  Feuerbach,  it  is  just 


FEUERBACH  83 

the  reverse.  He  is  realistic  in  form  ;he  begins 
with  man,  but  the  discussion  has  absolutely 
nothing  to  do  with  the  world  in  which  this 
man  lives,  and  so,  instead  of  the  man,  stands 
an  abstract  man,  who  preaches -sermons  con- 
cerning the  philosophy  of  religion.  This 
man  is  not  even  the  son  of  a  mother ;  he  has 
developed  from  the  God  of  the  monotheistic 
religions.  He  does  not  live  in  real  historic 
conditions  and  the  world  of  history.  He 
comes  into  relationship  with  other  men,  but 
each  of  the  others  is  just  as  much  an  abstrac- 
tion as  he  himself  is.  In  the  "  philosophy  of 
religion ' f  we  had  still  men  and  women,  but 
in  the i '  ethic ■  '  this  final  distinction  vanishes. 
At  long  intervals  Feuerbach  makes  such 
statements  as :  "  A  man  thinks  differently  in  j 
a  palace  than  in  a  hut. "  "  When  you  have  i 
nothing  in  your  body  to  ward  off  hunger  and 
misery,  you  have  nothing  in  your  head, 
mind  and  heart  for  morality."  "Politics 
must  be  our  religion, ' '  etc.  But  Feuerbach 
was  absolutely  incapable  of  extracting  any 
meaning  from  these  remarks;  they  remain 
purely  literary  expressions,  and  Starcke 
himself  is  obliged  to  admit  that  the  science 
of  politics  was  an  insuperable  obstacle  to 


84  FEUERBACH 


Feuerbach  and  the  science  of  society,  soci- 
ology, for  him  ajterra  incognita. 

He  appears  just  as  uninspired  in  com- 
parison with  Hegel  in  his  treatment  of  the 
antithesis  of  good  and  evil.  "One  thinks 
he  is  saying  something  great,"  Hegel  re- 
marks "if  one  says  that  mankind  is  by  na- 
ture good,  but  it  is  forgotten  that  one  says 
something  far  greater  in  the  words  "man  is 
by  nature  evil."  According  to  Hegel,  evil 
(is  the  form  in  which  the  mechanical  power 
of  evolution  shows  itself,  and  indeed  in  this 
lies  the  double  idea  that  each  new  step  for- 
ward appears  as  an  outrage  against  a  sacred 
thing,  as  rebellion  against  the  old,  dying, 
but  through  custom,  sanctified,  circum- 
stances, and  on  the  other  hand  that  since 
the  rising  of  class  antagonism,  the  evil  pas- 
sions of  men,  greed  and  imperiousness 
serve  as  the  levers  of  historical  progress, 
of  which,  for  example,  the  history  of  feud- 
alism and  the  bourgeoisie  affords  a  conspic- 
uous proof.  But  Feuerbach  does  not  trou- 
ble himself  to  examine  the  role  of  moral  evil. 
History  is  to  him  a  particularly  barren  and 
unwonted  field.  Even  his  statement,  "Man 
as  he  sprang  from  nature  originally  was 


FEUERBACH  85 

only  a  mere  creature,  not  a  man. M  "  Man  is 
a  product  of  human  society,  of  education, 
and  of  history."  Even  this  statement  re- 
mains from  his  standpoint  absolutely  un- 
productive. 

What  Feuerbach  communicates  to  us  re- 
specting morals  must  therefore  be  exceed- 
ingly narrow.  The  desire  for  happiness  is 
born  within  man  and  must  hence  be  the 
foundation  of  all  morality.  But  the  desire 
for  happiness  is  limited  in  two  ways ;  first, 
through  the  natural  results  of  our  acts ;  af- 
ter the  dissipation  comes  the  headache,  as  a 
result  of  habitual  excess,  sickness;  in  the 
second  place,  through  its  results  upon  soci- 
ety, if  we  do  not  respect  the  similar  desire 
for  happiness  on  the  part  of  other  people, 
they  resist  us  and  spoil  our  pursuit  of  hap- 
piness. It  follows,  therefore,  that  in  order 
to  enjoy  our  pursuit  of  happiness,  the  re- 
sult of  our  acts  must  be  rightly  appreciated, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  must  allow  of  the 
carrying  out  of  the  same  acts  on  the  part  of 
others.  Practical  self-control  with  regar<T 
to  ourselves  and  love,  always  love,  in  our 
intercourse  with  others  are  therefore  the 
foundation  rules  of  Feuerbach 's  morality,  j 


86  FEUERBACH 

from  which  all  others  lead,  and  neither  the 
enthusiastic  periods  of  Feuerbach  nor  the 
loud  praises  of  Starcke  can  set  off  the  thin- 
ness and  flatness  of  this  pair  of  utterances. 

The  desire  for  happiness  contents  itself 
only  very  exceptionally,  and  by  no  means 
to  the  profit  of  one's  self  or  other  people 
with  self.  But  it  requires  the  outside  world— 
means  of  satisfying  itself —therefore  means 
of  subsistence,  an  individual  of  the  other 
sex,  books,  convention,  argument,  activity, 
these  means  and  matters  of  satisfaction  are 
matters  of  utility  and  labor.  Feuerbach 's 
system  of  morality  either  predicates  that 
these  means  and  matters  of  satisfaction  are 
given  to  every  man  per  $e,  or,  since  it  gives 
him  only  unpractical  advice,  is  not  worth  a 
jot  to  the  people  who  are  without  these 
means.  And  this  Feuerbach  himself  shows 
clearly  in  forcible  words,  "One  thinks  dif- 
ferently in  a  palace  than  in  a  hut."  "Where 
owing  to  misery  and  hunger  you  have  no 
material  in  your  body,  you  have  also  no  ma- 
terial in  your  head,  mind  and  heart  for  mor- 
als. 

Are  matters  any  better  with  the  equal 
right  of  another  to  the  pursut  of  happiness  ? 


FEUERBACH  87 

Feuerbach  set  this  statement  out  as  abso- 
lute, as  applicable  to  all  times  and  circum- 
stances. But  since  when  has  it  been  true? 
Was  there  in  the  olden  time  between  slave 
and  master  or  in  the  Middle  Ages  between 
serf  and  baron  any  talk  about  equal  rights 
to  the  pursuit  of  happiness?  Was  not  the 
right  to  the  pursuit  of  happiness  of  the 
subject  class  sacrificed  to  the  dominant 
class  regardlessly  and  by  means  of  law?— 
nay,  that  was  immoral,  but  still  equality  of 
rights  is  recognized  no w-a-clays— recogniz- 
ed in  words  merely  since  the  bourgeoisie  in 
its  fight  against  feudalism  and  in  the  insti- 
tution of  capitalistic  production,  was  com- 
pelled to  abolish  all  existing  exclusive,  that 
is,  personal,  privileges,  and  for  the  first 
time  to  introduce  the  right  of  the  private  in- 
dividual, then  also  gradually  the  right  of  the 
State,  and  equality  before  law.  But  the 
pursuit  of  happiness  consists  for  the  least 
part  only  in  ideal  rights,  and  lies,  for  the 
most  part,  in  means  of  material  satisfac- 
tion takes  care  that  only  enough  for  bare 
subsistence  falls  to  the  great  majority  of 
those  persons  with  equal  rights,  and  there- 


M 


88  FEUERBACH 

fore  regards  the  equality  of  right  to  the  pur- 
suit of  happiness  hardly  better  than  slavery 
or  serfdom  did.  And  are  we  better  off  as 
regards  mental  means  of  happiness— means 
of  education?  Is  not  the  schoolmaster  of 
Sadowa  a  mythical  person? 
f  Further,  according  to  the  ethical  theory 
\  of  Feuerbach,  the  Bourse  is  the  highest  tem- 
ple of  morality,  only  provided  that  one  spec- 
ulate rightly.  If  my  pursuit  of  happiness 
leads  me  to  the  Bourse,  and  I,  in  following 
my  business,  manage  so  well  that  only  what 
is  agreeable  and  nothing  detrimental  comes 
to  me,  that  is  that  I  win  steadily,  Feuer- 
bach 's  precept  is  carried  out.  In  this  way 
I  do  not  interfere  with  the  similar  pursuit 
of  happiness  of  anyone  else,  since  the  other 
man  goes  on  the  Bourse  just  as  voluntarily 
as  I  do,  and  at  the  conclusion  of  his  affairs 
a  sentimental  expression,  for  each  finds  in 
the  other  the  satisfaction  of  his  pursuit  of 
happiness  which  it  is  just  the  business  of 
love  to  bring  about,  and  which  it  here  prac- 
tically accomplishes.  And  since  I  carry  on 
my  operations  with  more  exact  prudence 
and  therefore  with  greater  success  I  fulfill 
the  strongest  maxims  of  the  Feuerbach  mor- 


FEUERBACH  89 

al  philosophy  and  become  a  rich  man  into 
the  bargain.  In  other  words,  Feuerbach's 
morality  is  hewn  out  of  the  capitalistic  sys- 
tem of  today,  little  as  he  might  wish  or  think 
it  to  be. 

But  love,  yes  love,  is  particularly  and 
eternally  the  magical  god  who,  according  to 
Feuerbach,  surmounts  all  the  difficulties  of 
practical  life  and  that  in  a  society  which  is 
divided  into  classes  with  diametrically  op- 
posing interests.  The  last  remnant  of  its 
revolutionary  character  is  thus  taken  from 
his  philosophy,  and  there  remains  the  old 
cant— " love  one  another"— fall  into  each 
other's  arms  without  regard  to  any  impedi- 
ment of  sex  or  position— universal  intoxi- 
cation of  reconciliation. 

In  a  word,  the  moral  theories  of  Feuer- 
bach turn  out  to  be  the  same  as  those  of  all 
of  his  predecessors..  It  is  a  hodge-podge  of 
all  times,  all  people,  and  all  conditions,  and 
for  this  occasion  is  applicable  to  no  time  and 
place,  and  as  regards  the  actual  world  is  as 
powerless  as  Kant's  "Categorical  Impera- 
tive." As  a  matter  of  fact,  every  class,  as 
well  as  every  profession,  has  its  own  sys- 
tem of  morals  and  breaks  even  this  when  it 


90  FEUERBACH 

can  do  it  without  punishment,  and  love, 
which  is4o  unite  all,  appears  today  in  wars, 
controversies,  lawsuits,  domestic  broils  and 
as  far  as  possible  mutual  plunder. 

But  how  was  it  possible  that  the  powerful 
impetus  given  by  Feuerbach  turned  out  so 
unprofitable  to  Feuerbach  himself.  ( Simply 
in  this  way,  because  Feuerbach  could  not 
find  his  way  out  of  the  abstraction,  which  he, 
hated  with  a  deadly  hatred,  to  living  realityj 
He  clutches  hard  at  Nature  and  Humanity, 
but  "Nature"  and  "Humanity"  remain 
empty  words  with  him.  He  does  not  know 
how  to  tell  us  anything  positive  about  real 
nature  and  real  men.  We  can  only  reach  liv- 
ing men  from  the  abstract  men  of  Feuer- 
bach if  we  regard  them  as  active  historical 
agents.  Feuerbach  strove  against  that, 
hence  the  year  1848,  which  he  did  not  un- 
derstand, signified  for  him  merely  the  final 
break  with  the  real  world,  retirement  into 
solitude.  German  conditions  must  for  the 
most  part  bear  the  guilt  of  allowing  him  to 
starve  miserably. 

But  the  step  which  Feuerbach  did  not 
make  had  not  yet  been  made.  The  cultus  of 
man  in  the  abstract  which  was  the  kernel  of 


FEUERBACH  91 

Feuerbach's  religion  must  be  replaced  by 
the  knowledge  of  real  men  and  their  histor- 
ical development.  This  advance  of  Feuer- 
bach's  view  beyond  Feuerbach  himself  was 
published  in  1845  by  Marx  in  the  "Holy 
Family." 


92  FEUERBACH 


* 


IV. 

Strauss,  Bauer,  Stirner,  Feuerbach,  these 
were  the  minor  representatives  of  the  Heg- 
elian philosophy,  so  far  as  they  did  not 
abandon  the  field  of  philosophy.  Strauss 
has,  in  addition  to  the  ' '  Life  of  Jesus ' '  and 
' \  Dogmatics, ' '  only  produced  philosophical 
and  ecclesiastical  historical  work  of  a  lit- 
erary character,  after  the  fashion  of  Eenan ; 
Bauer  has  merely  done  something  in  the  de- 
partment of  primitive  Christianity,  but  that 
significant;  Stirner  remained  a  " freak" 
even  after  Bakunine  had  mixed  him  with 
Proudhon  and  designated  his  amalgama- 
tion "Anarchism."  Feuerbach  alone  posses- 
ed  any  significance  as  a  philosopher ;  but  not 
only  did  philosophy  remain  for  him  the 
vaunted  superior  of  all  other  sciences,  the 
quintessence  of  all  science,  an  impassable 
limitation,  the  untouchable  holy  thing,  he 
\  stood  as  a  composite  philosopher ;  the  under 
\  half  of  him  was  materialist,  the  upper  half 
I  idealist.  He  was  not  an  apt  critic  of  Hegel 


FEUERBACH  93 

but  simply  put  him  aside  as  of  no  account, 
while  he  himself,  in  comparison  with  the 
•encyclopedic  wealth  of  the  Hegelian  system, 
contributed  nothing  of  any  positive  value, 
except  a  bombastic  religion  of  love  and  a 
thin,  impotent  system  of  ethics. 

But  from  the  breaking  up  of  the  Hegelian 
school  there  proceeded  another,  the  only  one 
which  has  borne  real  fruit,  and  this  tendency 
is  coupled  with  the  name  of  Marx.* 

In  this  case  the  separation  from  the  Heg- 
elian philosophy  occurred  by  means  of  a 
return  to  the  materialistic  standpoint,  that 
is  to  say,  a  determination  to  comprehend  the 
actual  world  —  nature  and  history  —  as  it 
presents  itself  to  each  one  of  us,  without  any 


♦It  is  incumbent  upon  me  to  make  a  personal  explanation 
at  this  place.  People  have  lately  referred  to  my  share 
in  this  theory,  and  so  I  can  hardly  refrain  from  saying 
a  few  words  here  in  settlement  of  that  particular  matter. 
I  cannot  deny  that  I  had  before  and  during  my  forty 
years'  collaboration  with  Marx  a  certain  independent 
share  not  only  in  laying  out  the  foundations,  but  more 
particularly  in  working  out  the  theory.  But  the  great- 
est part  of  the  leading  essential  thinking,  particularly  in 
the  realm  of  economics,  and  especially  its  final  sharp 
statement,  belongs  to  Marx  alone.  What  I  contributed 
Marx  could  quite  readily  have  carried  out  without  me 
with  the  exception  of  a  pair  of  special  applications.  What 
Marx  supplied,  I  could  not  have  readily  brought.  Marx 
stood  higher,  saw  further,  took  a  wider,  clearer,  quicker 
survey  than  all  of  us.  Marx  was  a  genius,  we  others,  at 
the  best,  talented.  Without  him  the  theory  would  not  be 
what  it  is  today,  by  a  long  way.  It  therefore  rightly 
bears  his  name. 


94  FEUERBACH 

preconceived  idealistic  balderdash  interfer- 
ing; it  was  resolved  to  pitilessly  sacrifice 
any  idealistic  preconceived  notion  which 
could  not  be  brought  into  harmony  with 
facts  actually  discovered  in  their  mu- 
tual relations,  and  without  any  visionary 
notions.  And  materialism  in  general  claims 
no  more.  Only  here,  for  the  first  time  in 
the  history  of  the  materialistic  philosophy, 
was  an  earnest  endeavor  made  to  carry  its 
results  to  all  questions  arising  in  the  realm 
of  knowledge,  at  least  in  its  characteristic 
features. 

Hegel  was  not  merely  put  on  one  side,  the 
school  attached  itself  on  the  contrary  to  his 
openly    revolutionary    side,    the    dialectic 
method.    But  this  method  was  of  no  service 
in  its  Hegelian  form.    According  to  Hegel 
/the  dialectic  is  the  self-development  of  the 
[idea.    The  Absolute  Idea  does  not  only  ex- 
list  from  eternity,  but  it  is  also  the  actual 
living  soul  of  the  whole  existing  world.    It 
develops  from  itself  to  itself  through  all 
the  preliminary  stages  which  are  treated  of 
at  large  in  i  {  Logic, 9  \  and  which  are  all  in- 
j  eluded  in  it.  Then  it  steps  outside  of  itself, 
I  changing  with  nature  itself,  where  it,  with- 


FEUERBACH  95 

out  self-consciousness,  is  disguised  as  a  ne- 
cessity of  nature,  goes  through  a  new  devel- 
opment, and,  finally,  in  man  himself,  be- 
comes self-consciousness.  This  self-con- 
sciousness now  works  itself  out  into  the 
higher  stages  from  the  lower  forms  of  mat- 
ter, until  finally  the  Absolute  Idea  is  again 
realized  in  the  Hegelian  philosophy. 
According  to  Hegel,  the  dialectic  devel- 
opment apparent  in  nature  and  his- 
tory, that  is  a  causative,  connected 
progression  from  the  lower  to  the  higher,  in 
spite  of  all  zig-zag  movements  and  momen- 
tary setbacks,  is  only  the  stereotype  of  the 
self-progression  of  the  Idea  from  eternity, 
whither  one  does  not  know,  but  independent 
at  all  events  of  the  thought  of  any  human 
brain.  This  topsy-turvy  ideology  had  to 
be  put  aside.  We  conceived  of  ideas  as  ma- 
terialistic, as  pictures  of  real  things,  instead 
of  real  things  as  pictures  of  this  or  that 
stage  of  the  Absolute  Idea.  Thereupon,  the 
dialectic  became  reduced  to  knowledge  of 
the  universal  laws  of  motion— as  well  of 
the  outer  world  as  of  the  thought  of  man— 
two  sets  of  laws  which  are  identical  as  far  as 
matter  is  concerned  but  which  differ  as  re- 


96  FEUERBACH 

gards  expression,  in  so  far  as  the  mind  of 
man  can  employ  them  consciously,  while, 
in  nature,  and  up  to  now,  in  human  his- 
tory,  for  the  most  part  they  accomplish 
themselves,  unconsciously  in  the  form  of 
external  necessity,  through  an  endless  suc- 
cession of  apparent  accidents.      Hereupon 
the  dialectic  of  the  Idea  became  itself  mere- 
ly   the  conscious   reflex   of    the    dialectic 
revolution  of  the  real  world,  and  therefore, 
I  the  dialectic  of  Hegel  was  turned  upside 
:  down  or  rather  it  was  placed  upon  its  feet 
•  instead  of  on  its  head,  where  it  was  stand- 
ing before.    And  this  materialistic  dialectic 


X' 


which  since  that  time  has  been  our  best  tool 
and  our  sharpest  weapon  was  discovered, 
not  by  us  alone,  but  by  a  German  workman, 
Joseph  Dietzgen,  in  a  remarkable  manner 
and  utterly  independent  of  us. 

But  just  here  the  revolutionary  side  of 
,  Hegel's  philosophy  was  again  taken  up,  and 
at  the  same  time  freed  from  the  idealistic 
frippery  which  had  in  Hegel 's  hands  inter- 
fered with  its  necessary  conclusions.  The 
great  fundamental  thought,  namely,  that, 
the  world  is  not  to  be  considered  as  a  com- 
plexity of  ready-made  things,  but  as  a  com- 


FEUERBACH  97 

plexity  made  up  of  processes  in  which  the 
apparently  stable  things,  no  less  than  the 
thought  pictures  in  the  brain— the  idea, 
cause  an  unbroken  chain  of  coming  into  be- 
ing and  passing  away,  in  which,  by  means 
of  all  sorts  of  seeming  accidents,  and  in 
spite  of  all  momentary  setbacks,  there  is 
carried  out  in  the  end  a  progressive  develop- . 
meat— this  great  foundation  thought  has, 
particularly  since  the  time  of  Hegel,  so 
dominated  the  thoughts  of  the  mass 
of  men  that,  generally  speaking,  it  is 
now  hardly  denied.  But  to  acknowl- 
edge it  in  phrases,  and  to  apply  it  in 
reality  to  each  particular  set  of  condi- 
tions which  come  up  for  examination,  are 
two  different  matters.  But  if  one  proceeds 
steadily  in  his  investigations  from  this  his- 
toric point,  then  a  stop  is  put,  once  and  for 
all,  to  the  demand  for  final  solutions  and  for 
eternal  truths ;  one  is  firmly  conscious  of  the 
necessary  limitations  of  all  acquired  knowl- 
edge, of  its  hypothetical  nature,  owing  to  the 
circumstances  under  which  it  has  been 
gained.  One  cannot  be  imposed  upon  any 
longer  by  the  inflated  insubstantial  anti- 
theses of  the  older  metaphysics  of  true  and 


98  FEUERBACH 

false,  good  and  evil,  identical  and  differ- 
entiated, necessary  and  accidental;  one 
knows  that  these  antitheses  have  only  a  rel- 
ative significance,  that  that  which  is  recog- 
nized as  true  now,  has  its  concealed  and 
later-developing  false  side,  justas  that  which 
is  recognized  as  false,  its  true  side,  by  vir- 
tue of  which  it  can  later  on  prevail  as  the 
truth;  that  so-called  necessity  is  made 
up  of  the  merely  accidental,  and  that  the  ac- 
knowledged accidental  is  the  form  behind 
which  necessity  conceals  itself  and  so  on. 

The  old  methods  of  enquiry  and  thought 
which  Hegel  terms  metaphysics,  which  by 
preference  busied  themselves  by  enquiring 
into  things  as  given  and  established  quanti- 
ties, and  the  vestiges  of  which  still  buzz  in 
the  heads  of  people,  had  at  that  time  great 
historical  justification.  Things  had  first  to  be 
examined,  before  it  was  possible  to  examine 
processes ;  man  must  first  know  what  a  thing 
was  before  he  could  examine  the  preceding 
I  changes  in  it.  And  so  it  was  with  natural 
science.  The  old  metaphysic  which  compre- 
hended things  as  stable  came  from  a  philos- 
ophy which  enquired  into  dead  and  living 
things  as  things  comprehended  as  stable. 


FEUERBACH  99 

But  when  this  enquiry  had  so  far  progressed 
that  the  decisive  step  was  possible,  namely, 
the  systematic  examination  of  the  preceding 
changes  in  those  things  going  on  in  nature 
itself,  then  occurred  the  death-blow  of  the 
old  metaphysics  in  the  realm  of  philosophy. 
And,  in  fact,  if  science  to  the  end  of  the  last 
century  was  chiefly  a  collecting  of  knowl- 
edge, the  science  of  actual  things,  so  is 
science  in  our  day  pre-eminently  an  arrang- 
ing of  knowledge,  the  science  of  changes, 
of  the  origin  and  progress  of  things,  and  the 
mutual  connection  which  binds  these 
changes  in  nature  into  one  great  whole. 
Physiology,  which  examines  the  earlier 
forms  of  plant  and  animal  organisms ;  em- 
bryology, which  deals  with  the  development 
of  the  elementary  organism  from  germ  to 
maturity;  geology,  which  investigates  the 
gradual  formation  of  the  earth's  crust,  are 
all  the  products  of  our  century. 

But,  first  of  all,  there  are  three  great  dis- 
coveries which  have  caused  our  knowledge 
of  the  interdependence  of  the  processes  of 
nature  to  progress  by  leaps  and  bounds.  In 
the  first  place,  the  discovery  of  the  cell,  as 
the  unit,  from  the  multiplication  and  differ- 


100  FEUERBACH 

entiation  of  which,  the  whole  of  plant  and 
animal  substance  develop  so  that  not  only 
the  growth  and  development  of  all  higher 
classes  of  all  higher  organisms  is 
recognized  as  following  a  universal  law, 
but  the  very  path  is  shown  in  the 
capacity  for  differentiation  in  the  cell, 
by  which  organisms  are  enabled  to 
change  their  forms  and  make  thereby  a  more 
individual  development.  Secondly,  the  met- 
amorphosis of  energy  which  has  shown  us 
that  all  the  so-called  real  forces  in  inorganic 
nature,  the  mechanical  forces  and  their  com- 
plements, the  so-called  potential  energies, 
heat,  radiation  (light,  radiating  heat),  elec- 
tricity, magnetism,  chemical  energy,  are  dif- 
ferent forms  of  universal  motion,  which 
pass,  under  certain  conditions,  the  one  into 
the  other,  so  that  in  place  of  those  of  the  one 
which  disappear,  a  certain  number  of  the 
other  appear,  so  that  the  whole  movement 
of  nature  is  reduced  to  this  perpetual  pro- 
cess of  transformation  from  one  into  the 
other.  Finally,  the  proof  first  developed 
logically  by  Darwin,  that  the  organic  pro- 
ducts of  nature  about  us,  including  man,  are 
the  result  of  a  long  process  of  evolution, 


FEUERBACH  101 

from  a  few  original  single  cells,  and  these 
again,  by  virtue  of  chemical  processes,  have 
proceeded  from  protoplasm  or  white  of  egg. 
Thanks  to  these  three  great  discoveries 
and  the  resultant  powerful  advance  of  sci- 
ence, we  have  now  arrived  at  a  point  where 
we  can  show  the  connection  between  changes 
in  nature,  not  only  in  specific  cases,  but  also 
in  the  relation  of  the  specific  cases  to  the 
whole  and  so  give  a  bird's  eye  view  of  the 
interrelation  of  nature  in  an  approximately 
scientific  form  by  means  of  the  facts  shown 
by  empirical  science  itself.  To  furnish  this 
complete  picture  was  formerly  the  task  of 
the  so-called  philosophy  of  nature.  It  could 
then  only  do  this  by  substituting  ideal  and 
imaginary  hypotheses  for  the  unknown  real 
interconnection,  by  filling  out  the  missing 
facte  with  mind-pictures  and  by  bridging 
the  chasms  by  empty  imaginings.  It  had 
many  happy  thoughts  in  these  transports 
(of  imagination),  it  anticipated  many  later 
discoveries,  but  it  also  caused  the  survival 
of  considerable  nonsense  up  to  the  present 
time  which  could  not  otherwise  have  been 
possible.  At  present,  when  the  results  of 
the  investigation  of  nature  need  only  be  con- 


102  FEUERBACH 

conceived  of  dialectically,  that  is  in  the 
sense  of  their  mutual  interconnection,  to 
arrive  at.  a  system  of  nature  sufficient  for 
our  time,  when  the  dialectical  charac- 
ter of  this  interconnection  forces  itself  into 
the  metaphysically  trained  minds  of  expe- 
rimental scientists,  against  their  will,  today 
a  philosophy  of  nature  is  finally  disposed 
of,  every  attempt  at  its  resurrection  would 
not  only  be  superfluous,  it  would  even  be  a 
step  backwards. 

But  what  is  true  of  nature,  which  is  here- 
by recognized  as  an  historical  process,  is 
true  also  of  the  history  of  society  in  all  its 
branches,  and  of  the  totality  of  all  sciences 
which  occupy  themselves  with  things  hu- 
man and  divine.  Here  also  the  philosophy 
of  jurisprudence,  of  history,  of  religion, 
etc.,  consisted  in  this,  that  in  place  of  the 
true  interconnection  of  events,  one  originat- 
ing in  the  mind  of  the  philosopher  was  sub- 
stituted; that  history,  in  its  totality  as  in 
its  parts,  was  comprehended  as  the  gradual 
realization  of  ideas,  but,  of  course,  always 
of  the  pet  idea  of  the  philosopher  himself. 

History  worked  up  to  now,  unconsciously 
but  necessarily,  towards  a  certain  prede- 


FEUERBACH  103 

termined,  fixed,  ideal  goal,  as  for  example 
in  the  case  of  Hegel,  towards  the  realization 
of  his  Absolute  Idea>  and  the  unalterable 
trend  towards  this  Absolute  Idea  constituted 
the  inward  connection  of  historic  facts.  In 
the  place  of  the  real,  and  up  to  this  time  un- 
known, interrelation,  man  set  a  new  myste- 
rious destiny,  unconscious  or  gradually  com- 
ing into  consciousness.  It  was  necessary 
in  this  case,  therefore,  just  as  in  the 
realm  of  nature,  to  set  aside  these  artificial 
interrelations  by  the  discovery  of  the  real, 
a  task  which  finally  culminated  in  the  dis- 
covery of  the  universal  laws  of  progress, 
which  established  themselves  as  the  domi- 
nating ones  in  the  history  of  human  society. 
The  history  of  the  growth  of  society  ap- 
pears, however,  in  one  respect  entirely  differ- 
ent from  that  of  nature.  In  nature  are  to  be 
found  as  far  as  we  leave  the  reaction  of  man 
upon  nature  out  of  sight— mere  unconscious 
blind  agents  which  act  one  upon  another, 
and  in  their  interplay  the  universal  law  re- 
alizes itself.  From  all  that  happens,  whether 
from  the  innumerable  apparent  accidents 
which  appear  upon  the  surface,  or  from  the 
final  results  flowing  from  these  accidental 


104  FEUERBACH 

occurrences,  nothing  occurs  as  a  desired 
conscious  end.  On  the  contrary,  in  the 
|  history  of  society  the  mere  actors  are  all  en- 
idowed  with  consciousness;  they  are  agents 
imbued  with  deliberation  or  passion,  men 
working  towards  an  appointed  end ;  nothing 
appears  without  an  intentional  purpose, 
without  an  end  desired.  But  this  distinc- 
tion, important  as  it  is  for  historical  exam- 
ination, particularly  of  single  epochs  and 
events,  can  make  no  difference  to  the  fact 
that  the  course  of  history  is  governed  by 
inner  universal  laws.  Here  also,  in  spite 
of  the  wished  for  aims  of  all  the  separate 
individuals,  accident  for  the  most  part  is 
apparent  on  the  surface.  That  which  is 
willed  but  rarely  happens.  In  the  majority 
of  instances  the  numerous  desired  ends 
cross  and  interfere  with  each  other,  and 
either  these  ends  are  utterly  incapable  of 
realization,  or  the  means  are  ineffectual. 
So,  the  innumerable  conflicts  of  individual 
wills  and  individual  agents  in  the  realm  of 
history  reach  a  conclusion  which  is  on  the 
whole  analogous  to  that  in  the  realm  of  na- 
ture, which  is  without  definite  purpose.  The\ 
ends  of  the  actions  are  intended,  but  the  re-i 


FEUERBACH  105 

suits  which  follow  from  the  actions  are  not 
intended,  or  in  so  far  as  they  appear  to  cor- 
respond with  the  end  desired,  in  their  final 
results  are  quite  different  from  the  conclu- 
sion wished.  Historical  events  in  their  en- 
tirety therefore  appear  to  be  likewise  con- 
trolled by  chance.  But  even  where  according! 
to  superficial  observation,  accident  plays  a! 
part,  it  is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  consistently) 
governed  by  unseen,  internal  laws,  and  the 
only  qestion  remaining,  therefore,  is  to  dis- 
cover these  laws. 

Men  make  their  own  history  in  that  each 
follows  his  own  desired  ends  independent 
of  results,  and  the  results  of  these  many 
wills  acting  in  different  directions  and  their 
manifold  effects  upon  the  world  constitute 
history.  It  depends,  therefore,  upon  what 
the  great  majority  of  individuals  intend. 
The  will  is  determined  by  passion  or  reflec- 
tion, but  the  levers  which  passion  or  reflec- 
tion immediately  apply  are  of  very  different 
kinds.  (Sometimes  it  may  be  external  cir- 
cumstances, sometimes  ideal  motives,  zeal 
for  honor,  enthusiasm  for  truth  and  justice, 
personal  hate,  or  even  purely  individual  pe- 
culiar ideas  of  all  kinds.    But  on  the  one 


106  FEUEKBACH 

hand,  we  have  seen  in  history  that  the  re- 
sults of  many  individual  wills  produce  ef- 
fects, for  the  most  part  quite  other  than 
what  is  wished— often,  in  fact,  the  very  op- 
posite—their motives  of  action,  likewise,  are 
only  of  subordinate  significance  with  re- 
gard to  the  universal  result.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  question  arises:  What  driving 
forces  stand  in  turn  behind  these  motives  of 
action;  what  are  the  historical  causes  which 
transform  themselves  into  motives  of  action 
in  the  brains  of  the  agents  ? 

The  old  materialism  never  set  this  ques- 
tion before  itself.  Its  philosophy  of  history, 
as  far  as  it  ever  had  one  in  particular,  is 
hence  essentially  pragmatic;  it  judges  ev- 
erything from  the  standpoint  of  the  immedi- 
ate motive ;  it  divides  historical  agents  into 
good  and  bad  and  finds  as  a  whole  that  the 
good  are  defrauded  and  the  bad  are  victo- 
rious, whence  it  follows  that,  as  far  as  the 
old  materialism  is  concerned,  there  is  noth- 
ing edifying  that  can  be  obtained  from  a 
study  of  history,  and  for  us,  that  in  the 
realm  of  history  tiie  old  materialism  is 
proved  to  be  false,  since  it  fixes  active  ideal 
impulses  as  final  causes  instead  of  seeking 


FEUERBACH  107 

that  which  lies  behind  them,  that  which  is 
the  impulse  of  these  impulses.  The  lack  of 
logical  conclusion  does  not  lie  in  the  fact 
that  ideal  impulses  are  recognized,  but  in 
this,  that  there  is  no  further  examination 
into  the  more  remote  causes  of  their  activ- 
ity. The  philosophy  of  history,  on  the  con- 
trary, particularly  as  it  was  treated  by 
Hegel,  recognizes  that  the  ostensible  and 
even  the  real  motives  of  the  men  who  figure 
in  history,  are  by  no  means  the  final  causes 
of  historical  events,- that  behind  these  events 
stand  other  moving  forces  which  must  be 
discovered ;  but  it  seeks^  these  forces  not  in 
history  itself,  it  imports  them  mostly  from 
the  outside,  from  philosophical  ideology, 
into  history.  Instead  of  explaining  the  his- 
tory of  ancient  Greece  from  its  own  inner 
connection,  Hegel,  for  example,  explains  it 
solely  as  if  it  were  nothing  but  the  working 
out  of  a  beautiful  individuality,  the  realiza- 
tion of  art,  as  such.  He  says  much  about 
the  old  Greeks  that  is  fine  and  profound, 
but  this  does  not  prevent  our  dissatisfaction, 
now-a-days,  with  such  an  explanation, 
which  is  mere  phraseology. 

If,  therefore,  we  set  out  to  discover  the 


108  FEUERBACH 

impelling  forces,  which,  acknowledged,  or 
unacknowledged,  and  for  the  most  part  un- 
acknowledged, stand  behind  historical  fig- 
ures, and  constitute  the  true  final  impulses 
of  history,  we  cannot  consider  so  much  the; 
motives  of  single  iMividuals,  however  pre- 
eminent, as  those  which  set  in  motion  great 
masses,  entire  nations,  and  again,  whole 
classes  of  people  in  each  nation,  and  this, 
too,  not  in  a  momentarily  flaring  and  quick* 
ly  dying  flame,  but  to  enduring  action  cul- 
minating in  a  great  historical  change.  To 
establish  the  great  impelling  forces  which 
play  upon  the  brains  of  the  acting  masses 
and  their  leaders,  the  so-called  great  men,  as 
conscious  motives,  clear  or  unclear,  directly 
or  ideologically  or  even  in  a  supernatural 
form,  that  is  the  only  method  which  can 
place  us  on  the  track  of  the  law  controlling 
history  as  a  whole,  as  well  as  at  particlar  pe- 
riods and  in  individual  lands.  All  that  sets) 
men  in  motion  must  act  upon  their  minds,; 
I  but  the  force  which  acts  upon  the  brain 
depends  very  largely  upon  circumstances. 
The  workers  have  by  no  means  become  rec-j 
onciled  to  the  machine  power  of  the  capi- 
talists although  they  no  longer  break  the 


FEUERBACH  109 

machines  to  pieces  as  they  did  on  the  Rhine 
in  1848.  j 

But  while  the  discovery  of  these  impel- 
ling forces  of  history  was  entirely  impossi- 
ble in  all  other  periods,  on  account  of  the 
complicated  and  hidden  interrelations  with 
their  effects,  our  present  period  has  so  far 
simplified  these  relations  that  the  problem 
can  be  solved.  Since  the  establishment  of 
the  great  industry,  at  least  since  the  peace  of 
Europe  in  1815,  it  has  been  no  longer  a  se- 
cret to  anyone  in  England  that  the  whole 
political  fight  has  been  for  supremacy  be- 
tween two  classes,  the  landed  aristocracy 
and  the  middle-class.  In  France,  with  the 
return  of  the  Bourbons,  the  same  fact  was 
perceived;  the  writers  of  history,  from 
Thierry  to  Guizot,  Mignet,  and  Thiers  in 
particular,  pronounce  it  as  a  key  to  an  un- 
derstanding of  French  history,  especially 
since  the  Middle  Ages.  And  since  1830  the 
working  class,  the  proletariat,  has  beenrecog- 
nized  as  the  third  competitor  for  mastery 
in  both  countries.  Circumstances  had  be- 
come so  simplified  that  one  would  have  had 
to  close  his  eyes  not  to  see  in  the  fight  of 
these  three  classes  and  in  the  conflict  of 


110  FEUERBACH 

their  interests,  the  moving  forces  of  modern 
history,  at  least  in  the  two  most  advanced 
countries. 

But  how  came  these  classes  into  existence ! 
If  the  great  feudal  ancient  property  in  land 
can  have  its  origin  ascribed  to  political 
causes  through  forcible  seizure  of  territo- 
ries, this  could  not  be  done  as  regards  the 
bourgeoisie  and  the  proletariat.  There  are 
in  this  case  clearly  exposed  the  origin  and 
progress  of  two  great  economic  classes  from 
plain  and  evident  economic  causes.  And  it 
was  just  as  clear  that  in  the  fight  between 
the  landholding  class  and  the  bourgeoisie, 
no  less  than  in  that  between  the  bourgeoisie 
and  the  proletariat,  economic  interests  were 
the  most  important,  and  that  political  force 
served  only  as  a  mere  means  of  furthering 
these. 

The  bourgeoisie  and  the  proletariat  both 
arose  as  results  of  a  change  in  economic 
conditions,  or,  strictly  speaking,  in  methods 
N  of  production.  The  transition,  first  from 
hand  labor,  controlled  by  the  gilds,  to  man- 
ufacture and  thence  from  manufacture  to 
the  greater  industry,  with  steam  and  ma- 
chine force,  has  developed  these  two  classes. 


FEUERBACH  111 

At  a  certain  stage  new  forces  of  production 
were  set  in  motion  by  the  bourgeoisie,  fol- 
lowing upon  the  division  of  labor  and  the 
union  of  many  different  kinds  of  labor  in 
one  united  manufacture,  and  the  methods 
of  exchange  and  requirements  of  exchange 
developed  by  their  means,  were  incompati- 
ble with  the  existing  historical  surviving 
methods  of  production  consecrated  by  the 
law,  that  is  to  say  the  gilds  and  the  innumer- 
able personal  and  other  privileges  (which 
for  the  unprivileged  were  only  so  many  fet- 
ters) of  the  feudal  social  organization.  The 
forces  of  production  brought  into  being  by 
the  bourgeoisie  rebelled  against  the  methods 
of  production  originated  by  the  gildmasters 
and  the  feudal  landlords;  the  result  igj 
known;  the  feudal  fetters  were  struck  off, \ 
in  England  gradually,  in  France  at  one 
blow;  in  Germany  the  process  is  not  yet 
quite  complete.  As  manufacture  came  into 
conflict  at  a  certain  stage  of  progress  with 
feudal  methods  of  production,  so  has  the 
greater  industry  now  joined  battle  with  the 
bourgeois  organization  of  industry  estab- 
lished in  their  place.  Bound  by  this  sys- 
tem, owing  to  the  narrow  limits  of  the  capi- 


112  FEUERBACH 

talistic  methods  of  production,  there  occurs 
on  the  one  hand  an  ever  increasing  conver- 
sion of  the  mass  of  the  people  into  proleta- 
rians, and  on  the  other  hand  an  ever  increas- 
ing amount  of  products  which  cannot  be  dis- 
posed of.  Over-production,  and  suffering 
on  the  part  of  the  masses,  the  one  the  cause 
of  the  other,  that  is  the  absurd  contradic- 
tion in  which  it  runs  its  course,  and  which 
of  necessity  requires  a  control  of  the 
forces  of  production,  through  a  change  in 
the  methods  of  production. 

In  modern  history,  at  least,  it  is  therefore 
j  proved  that  all  political  contests  are  class 
contests  and  that  all  fights  of  classes  for 
emancipation,  in  spite  of  their  necessarily 
;  political  form  (for  every  class  struggle  is 
I  a  political  struggle) ,  finally,  are  directed 
towards  economic  emancipation.     Here,  at 
least,  therefore,  the  State,  the  political  ar- 
rangement is  the  subordinate,  bourgeois  so- 
ciety, the  rule  of   economic   relations,   the 
Redding  element.     The  old  fashioned  phi- 
losophy which  even  Hegel  respected  saw  in 
the  State  the  determining  element  and  in 
bourgeois  society  the  element  determined 
by  it.    Appearances  corresponded  with  this 


FEUERBACH  113 

idea-  As  all  the  impulses  of  each  single 
agent  pass  through  his  individual  brain 
and  must  transform  themselves  into 
motives  of  his  will  in  order  to  set  him 
to  work,  so  must  also  the  desires  of  bour- 
geois society,  no  matter  which  class  hap- 
pens to  be  dominant,  penetrate  the  will  of 
the  state  in  order  to  secure  universal  valid- 
ity in  the  form  of  laws.  That  is  the  formal 
side  of  the  matter  which  is  self  evident,  the 
question  only  is  what  content  has  this  mere- 
ly formal  will— of  the  individual  as  well  as 
of  the  State— and  whence  comes  this  con^ 
tent— why  is  just  this  desired  and  nothing 
else?  And  if  we  enquire  into  this  we  dis 
cover  that  in  modern  history  the  will  of  the 
State,  as  a  whole,  is  declared  through  the 
changing  needs  of  bourgeois  society, 
through  the  domination  of  this  or  that  class, 
in  the  last  instance  through  the  development 
of  the  forces  of  production  and  the  condi- 
tions of  exchange. 

But  if  in  our  modern  times,  with  their 
gigantic  methods  of  production  and  com- 
merce, the  State  is  not  an  independent  affair 
with  an  independent  development,  but  its 
existence  as  well  as  its  evolution  is  to  be  ex- 


114  FEUEKBACH 

plained  in  the  last  resort  from  the  economic 
conditions  of  the  life  of  society,  so  much  the 
more  must  the  same  thing  be  true  of  all 
earlier  times  when  the  production  of  the 
necessities  of  existence  was  not  furthered  by 
these  extensive  aids,  where,  therefore,  the 
necessities  of  this  production  must  ex- 
ercise a  greater  control  over  men.  If 
the  State  is  today,  at  the  time  of  the 
great  industries  and  steam  railways, 
merely,  as  a  whole,  the  summarized, 
reflected  form  of  the  economic  desires 
of  the  class  which  controls  production,  it 
must,  therefore,  have  been  still  more  so  at 
a  period  when  a  generation  of  men  must 
spend  the  greater  portion  of  their  united 
life-time  in  the  satisfaction  of  their  material 
needs,  and  man  was,  therefore,  much  more 
dependent  on  them  than  we  are  today.  The 
examination  of  the  earlier  epochs  of  history, 
as  far  as  it  is  earnestly  conducted  in  this 
direction,  establishes  this  abundantly,  but 
manifestly  this  cannot  here  be  taken  in  hand. 
If  the  State  and  public  law  are  the  crea- 
tures of  economic  conditions,  so,  obviously, 
is  private  law,  which  only  sanctions  rela- 
tions between  individuals  under  given  nor- 


FEUERBACH  115 

mal  economic  circumstances.  The  form  in 
which  this  appears  may,  however,  vary  con- 
siderably. One  can,  as  happened  in  Eng- 
land in  accordance  with  the  whole  national 
development,  retain,  for  the  most  part,  the 
forms  of  the  old  feudal  law,  and  give  them 
a  middle-class  content,  even  read  a  middle- 
class  meaning  into  the  feudal  names,  but 
one  may  also,  as  in  the  western  part  of  the 
European  continent,  use  as  a  foundation  the 
first  general  law  of  a  society  producing  com- 
modities, the  Roman,  with  its  unsurpassa- 
bly  keen  elaboration,  of  all  the  legal  rela- 
tions of  possessions  of  commodities  (sellers 
and  buyers,  creditors  and  debtors,  contracts, 
obligations,  etc.),  by  which  we  can  bring  it 
down  as  common-law  to  the  use  and  benefit 
of  a  still  small  bourgeois  and  half  feudal 
society;  or,  with  the  help  of  pseudo-en- 
lightened and  moralizing  jurists,  a  code 
(which  is  bad  from  a  legal  point  of  view) 
can  be  worked  out  suitable  to  the  conditions 
of  the  particular  society  (as  the  Prussian 
land  law).  And,  still  again^  after  a  great 
bourgeois  revolution,  a  classical  code  for 
bourgeois  society,  such  as  the  French  "Code 
Civil,"  may  be  worked  out.    If,  therefore, 


116  FEUERBACH 

the  bourgeois  laws  only  declare  the  econom- 
ic circumstances  of  society,  these  may  be 
good  or  bad  according  to  conditions. 

In  the  State  appears  the  first  ideological 
force  over  men.  Society  shapes  for  itself 
an  organ  for  the  protection  of  its  general 
interests  against  attack  from  the  outside  or 
inside.  This  organ  is  the  force  of  the  State. 
Hardly  did  it  come  into  being  before  this 
organ  dominated  society,  and  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  in  proportion  as  it  becomes  the  or- 
gan of  a  particular  class,  it  brings  into  ex- 
istence the  supremacy  of  that  class.  The 
fight  of  the  subject  against  the  dominant 
class  becomes  of  necessity  political,  a  fight 
in  the  next  place  against  the  political  control 
f  of  this  latter  class.  This  consciousness  of 
the  connection  of  the  political  fight  with  its 
underlying  economic  causes  becomes  more 
and  more  obscure  and  may  be  altogether 
lost.  Where  this  is  not  altogether  the  case 
with  the  combatants  it  becomes  nearly  al- 
together so  with  the  historians.  Of  the  an- 
cient sources  of  history  with  regard  to  the 
contest  within  the  Roman  Republic,  Appian 
alone  gives  us  plain  and  clear  information 
respecting  its  final  cause,  which  was  prop- 


FEUERBACH  117 

erty  in  land.  But  the  State,  once  become  an 
independent  power  over  society,  forthwith 
displayed  a  further  ideology.  Among  the 
practical  politicians  and  the  theorists  in  ju- 
risprudence, and  among  the  jurists  in  par- 
ticular, this  fact  is  first  completely  lost  sight 
of.  Since  in  each  single  instance  the  eco- 
nomic facts  must  take  the  form  of  juristic 
motives  so  as  to  be  sanctioned  in  the  form 
of  law,  and  since,  therefore,  a  backward 
view  must  be  taken  over  the  whole  existing 
system  of  law,  it  follows  therefrom  that  the 
juristic  form  appears  to  be  the  whole  and 
the  economic ^content  nothing  at  all.  Public 
and  private  law  are  considered  as  indepen- 
dent realms  which  have  their  own  indepen- 
dent historic  evolution,  which  are  consider- 
ed capable  of  a  systematic  representation, 
and  stand  in  need  of  it  through  persistent 
elimination  of  all  inner  contradictions. 

Still  higher  ideological  conceptions,  i.  e., 
still  further  removed  from  the  economic 
foundations,  take  the  form  of  philosophy 
and  religion.  Here,  the  connection  of  the 
ideas  with  the  material  conditions  of  exist- 
ence become  more  and  more  complicated  and 
obscured  by  reason  of  the  increasing  num- 


118  FEUERBACH 

ber  of  links  betwen  them,  but  it  exists.  As 
the  whole  Rennaissance  from  the  middle  of 
the  fifteenth  century  was  an  actual  product 
of  the  city,  and  therefore  of  the  bourgeois 
domination,  so  was  also  the  philosophy, 
since  that  time  newly  awakened.  Its  con- 
tent was  actually  only  the  philosophical  ex- 
pression of  the  thoughts  corresponding  with 
the  development  of  the  small  and  middle 
bourgeois  into  the  great  bourgeois.  Among 
the  English  and  French  of  the  preceding 
century,  who  were  for  the  most  part  as  gjod 
political  economists  as  they  were  philoso- 
phers, this  is  quite  evident,  and  we  have 
proofs  on  its  very  face,  as  regards  the 
Hegelian  school. 

Let  us  now  give  a  slight  glance  at  relig- 
ion since  it  appears  to  stand  furthest  away 
from  and  to  be  most  foreign  to  material  life. 

I  Religion  arose  at  a  very  remote  period  of 
human  development,  in  the  savage  state, 
from  certain  erroneous  and  barbaric  concep- 
tions of  men  with  regard  to  themselves  and 
the  outside  world  of  nature  around  them. 

f  Every  ideological  notion  develops,  however, 
when  once  it  has  arisen ;  it  grows  by  addi- 
tions to  the  given  idea,  and  develops  it  fur- 


FEUERBACH  119 

ther,  otherwise  there  would  be  no  ideology, 
that  is,  no  occupation  with  thoughts  as  with 
independent  thought-existence,  developing 
independently  and  subject  only  to  its  own 
laws.  That  the  material  conditions  of  life 
of  the  men  within  whose  heads  this  thought 
force  is  at  work  finally  determine  the  course 
of  this  thought-process  necessarily  remains 
still  unknown  to  these  men,  otherwise  there 
would  be  an  entire  end  of  the  ideology. 
These  original  religious  notions,  therefore, 
which  are  for  the  most  part  common  to  each 
kindred  group  of  peoples,  develop  after  the 
separation  of  the  group  in  a  special  manner 
peculiar  to  each  tribe,  according  to  its  par- 
ticular conditions  of  existence,  and  this 
process  is  for  a  class  of  groups  of  people, 
and  particularly  for  the  Aryans  (Indo- 
Europeans)  shown  individually  by 
comparative  mythology.  The  gods  de- 
veloped by  each  tribe  were  national 
gods,  whose  power  extended  no  fur- 
ther than  to  protect  the  national  terri- 
tory; beyond  the  frontier  other  gods  held 
undisputed  sway.  They  could  only  be  con-. 
ceived  of  as  existing  as  long  as  the  nation  ex- 
isted. They  fell  with  its  decline.  This  doctrine  , 


120  FEUERBACH 

of  the  old  nationalities  brought  about  the 
Roman  Empire,  whose  economic  conditions 
we  do  not  need  to  examine  just  now.  The  old 
national  gods  fell,  as  those  of  the  Romans 
did  also,  which  were  only  attached  to  the 
narrow  limits  of  the  city  of  Rome.  The  de- 
sire to  make  the  empire  a  world-empire,  by 
means  of  a  world-wide  religion,  is  clearly 
shown  in  the  attempts  to  provide  recogni- 
tion and  altars  in  Rome  for  all  the  respect- 
able foreign  gods,  next  to  the  indigenous 
ones.  But  a  new  world-religion  was  not  to 
be  made  in  this  fashion  by  imperial  de- 
crees. The  new  world-religion,  Christian- 
ity, had  already  arisen  in  secret  by  a 
mixture  of  combined  oriental  religions, 
Jewish  theology  and  popularized  Greek 
philosophy  and  particularly  Stoic  philos- 
ophy. We  must  first  be  at  the  pains  to  dis- 
cover how  it  originally  made  its  appearance, 
since  its  official  form  as  it  has  come  to  us  is 
merely  that  of  a  State  religion,  and  this  end 
was  achieved  through  the  Council  of  Nice. 
)  Enough,  the  fact  that  after  two  hundred  and 
fifty  years  it  was  a  state  religion  shows  that 
it  was  a  religion  answering  to  the  circum- 
|  stances  of  the  times.    In  the  Middle  Ages  it 


FEUERBACH  121 

showed  itself  clearly.  In  proportion  as  feu- 
dalism developed  it  grew  into  a  religion 
corresponding  with  it,  with  a  hierarchy  cor- 
responding to  the  feudal.  And  when  the 
rule  of  the  bourgeois  came  in,  it  developed 
into  Protestant  heresy  in  antagonism  to 
feudal  Catholicism,  at  first  in  the  South  of 
France,  among  the  Albigenses  at  the  time 
of  the  highest  growth  of  the  free  cities.  The 
Middle  Ages  had  annexed  all  the  surviving 
forms  of  ideology,  philosophy,  politics  and 
jurisprudence,  to  theology  as  subordinate 
parts  of  theology.  It  constrained,  there- 
fore, all  social  and  political  movement  to  as- 
sume a  theological  form;  finally,  to  the 
minds  of  the  masses  stuffed  with  religion  it 
was  necessary  to  show  their  interests  in  re- 
ligious guise,  in  order  to  raise  a  tremendous 
storm.  And  as  the  rule  of  the  bourgeois  from 
the  beginning  brought  into  being  an  append- 
age of  propertyless  plebeians,  with  day  la- 
borers and  servants  of  all  sorts,  without  any 
recognized  position  in  their  cities,  the  fore- 
runners of  the  later  proletarians,  so  the  here- 
sy was  very  early  subdivided  intoamoderate 
one,  on  the  part  of  the  citizens,  and  a  plebe- 
ian revolutionary  one,  which  was  an  abom- 


122  FEUERBACH 

ination  to  the  bourgeois  heretics. 

The  failure  to  exterminate  the  protestant 
heresy  corresponded  with  the  invincibility 
of  the  rising  power  of  the  bourgeois  of  that 
time ;  as  this  power  grew,  the  fight  with  the 
feudal  nobles,  at  first  pre-eminently  local, 
began  to  assume  national  proportions.  The 
first  great  conflict  occurred  in  Germany,  the 
so-called  Reformation,  The  power  of  the 
bourgeois  was  neither  sufficiently  strong 
nor  sufficiently  developed  for  an  open  rebel- 
lious stand,  by  uniting  under  the  standard 
of  revolt  the  city  plebeians,  the  smaller  no- 
bility, and  the  peasants  of  the  country  dis- 
tricts. The  nobility  was  struck  first,  the 
peasants  took  up  a  position  which  was  the 
high-water  mark  of  the  entire  revolution, 
the  cities  left  them  in  the  lurch,  and  so  the 
revolution  was  left  to  the  leaders  of  the  coun- 
try gentry  who  gathered  the  whole  victory 
to  themselves.  Thenceforth  for  three  hun- 
dred years  Germany  disappeared  from  the 
ranks  of  independent,  energetic  progressive 
countries.  But  after  the  German  Luther, 
arose  the  French  Calvin.  With  natural 
French  acuteness  he  showed  the  bourgeois 
character  of  the  revolution  in  the  Church, 


FEUERBACH  123 

republicanised  and  democratised.  While 
the  Lutheran  Reformation  fell  in  Germany 
and  Germany  declined,  the  Calvinistic 
served  as  a  standard  to  the  republicanis  in 
Geneva,  in  Holland,  in  Scotland,  freed  Hol- 
land from  German  and  Spanish  domination, 
and  gave  an  ideological  dress  to  the  second 
act  of  the  bourgeois  revolution  which  pro- 
ceeded in  England.  Here  Calvinism  proved 
itself  to  be  the  natural  religious  garb  of  the 
interests  of  the  existing  rule  of  the  bourgeois 
and  was  not  realised  any  further  than  that 
the  revolution  of  1689  was  completed  by  a 
compromise  between  a  portion  of  the  no- 
bility and  the  middle-class.  The  English 
Established  Church  was  restored,  but  not 
in  its  earlier  form  with  the  king  for  Pope, 
but  was  strongly  infused  with  Calvinism. 
The  old-established  Church  had  kept  up  the 
merry  Catholic  Sunday  and  fought  against 
the  tedious  Calvinistic  one,  the  new  bour- 
geois Church  introduced  the  latter  and 
added  thereby  to  the  charms  of  England. 

In  France  the  Calvinistic  minority  was 
subdued  in  1685,  either  made  Catholic  or 
hunted  out  of  the  country.  But  what  was 
the  good?  Directly  after  that  the  free  think- 


124  FE'UERBACH 

er  Pierre  Bayle  was  at  work,  and  in  1694 
Voltaire  was  born.  The  tyrannical  rule  of 
Louis  XIV.  only  made  it  easier  for  the 
French  bourgeoisie  to  be  able  to  make  its 
revolution  in  the  political  form  finally  suit- 
able to  the  progressive  atheistic  bourgeoisie. 
Instead  of  Protestants,  free-thinkers  took 
their  seats  in  the  National  Assembly.  There- 
by Christianity  entered  upon  the  last  lap  of 
the  race.  It  had  become  incapable  of  serv- 
ing a  progressive  class  any  further  as  the 
ideological  clothing  of  its  efforts,  it  became 
more  and  more  the  exclusive  possession  of 
the  dominant  classes,  and  these  used  it 
merely  as  a  simple  means  of  government  to 
keep  the  lower  classes  in  subjection.  So 
then  each  one  of  the  different  classes  em- 
ployed its  own  suitable  religion,  the  land- 
holding  squires  catholic  Jesuitism  or  prot- 
estant  orthodoxy,  the  liberal  and  radical 
bourgeois  rationalism,  and  it  makes  no  dif- 
ference therefore  whether  people  them- 
selves believe  in  their  respective  religions  or 
not. 

Thus  we  see  religion  once  arisen  contains 
material  of  tradition,  hence  in  all  ideolog- 
ical matters  religion  is  a  great  conservative 


FEUERBACH  125 

force.  But  the  changes  which  take  place  in 
this  material  spring  from  class-conditions, 
that  is  from  the  economic  circumstances  of 
the  men  who  take  these  changes  in  hand. 
And  that  is  enough  on  this  part  of  the  sub- 
ject. 

It  is  only  possible  at  this  time  to  give  a 
general  sketch  of  the  Marxian  philosophy 
of  history,  and  particularly  as  regards  il- 
lustrations of  it.  The  proof  is  to  be  dis- 
covered in  history  itself,  and  in  this  regard 
I  may  say  plainly  that  it  has  been  suffi- 
ciently furnished  in  other  writings.  This"? 
philosophy,  however,  makes  an  end  of  phi- 
losophy in  the  realm  of  history,  just  as  the 
dialectic  philosophy  of  nature  renders  every 
philosophy  of  nature  useless  or  impossible. 
Practically  there  is  no  further  need  to  de- 
vise interrelations  but  to  discover  them  in 
facts  rather.  Instead  of  a  philosophy  forced 
from  nature  and  history  there  remains  then 
only  the  realm  of  pure  thought— as  far  as 
any  is  left— the  teaching  of  the  laws  of 
the  thinking  process  itself,  logic  and  the 
dialectic. 

With  the  Revolution  of  1848  "educated' ! 
Germany  delivered  the  challenge  to  theory 


126  FEUERBACH 

and  proceeded  to  action.  Hand-labor  de- 
pendent upon  small  production  and  manu- 
facture was  done  away  with  by  the  great 
industry— Germany  again  appeared  in  the 
world-market.  The  new  particularistic 
Germany,  at  all  events  did  away  with  the 
most  crying  anomalies,  which  the  rule  of  the 
petty  states,  the  remnants  of  feudalism  and 
the  bureaucratic  economy,  had  placed  in  the 
way  of  their  development,  but  just  in  pro- 
portion as  speculation  abandoned  the  stud- 
ies of  philosophers  to  attain  its  temple  in 
the  Bourse,  that  great  theoretic  thought 
which  had  been  the  glory  of  Germany  in 
the  period  of  its  deepest  political  humilia- 
tion, the  zeal  for  pure  scientific  progress, 
irrespective  of  practical,  profitable  results, 
and  of  the  disapproval  of  the  police,  became 
lost  in  educated  Germany.  It  is  true  that 
the  German  official  natural  science  main- 
tained its  position,  particularly  in  the  field 
of  individual  discovery,  at  the  head  of  its 
time,  but  now  the  American  journal 
"Science"  justly  remarks  that  the  decisive 
advances  in  the  matter  of  the  broadest  in- 
clusive statement  of  the  relations  between 
single  facts,  and  the  harmonising  of  them 


FEUEKBACH  127 

with  law,  are  making  the  greater  headway 
in  England,  instead  of,  as  earlier,  in  Ger- 
many. And  with  regard  to  the  sciences  of 
history,  philosophy  included,  with  the  class- 
ical philosophy,  the  old  theoretical  spirit, 
with  its  carelessness  of  personal  results, 
first  completely  disappeared.  Thoughtless 
eclecticism,  eager  backward  glances  at  a 
career,  and  income  down  to  the  meanest 
sycophancy  occupy  their  places.  The  official 
representatives  of  this  sort  of  science  have 
become  the  ojten  ideologists  of  the  bour- 
geoisie and  the  existing  state,  but  at  a  time 
when  they  both  stand  in  open  antagonism 
to  the  working  classes. 

Only  among  the  working  classes  does  the 
German  devotion  to  abstract  thought  stead- 
ily continue  to  exist.  Here  it  cannot  be  got 
rid  of.  Here  we  find  no  backward  glances 
at  a  career,  at  profit  making,  at  kindly  pro- 
tection from  the  upper  classes,  but  on  the 
contrary  the  more  independent  and  unre- 
stricted the  path  of  science,  just  so  much 
the  more  does  it  find  itself  in  accord 
with  the  interests  and  endeavors  of  the 
working  class.  The  new  tendency,  which  j 
in    the    history    of    the    development    of 


128  FEUERBACH 

labor  made  known  the  key  to  the 
understanding  of  the  universal  history  of 
society  addressed  itself  in  the  first  place  to 
the  working  class  and  found  in  them  the 
ready  acceptance  which  it  neither  sought 
nor  expected  from  official  science.  The 
German  working-class  movement  is  the  heir 
of  the  German  classical  philosphy. 


FEUERBACH  129 

APPENDIX. 

MARX  ON  FEUERBACH. 

(Jotted  down  in  Brussels  in  the  spring  of 
1845.) 
The  chief  lack  of  all  materialistic  phi- 
losophy up  to  the  present,  including  that  of 
Feuerbach,  is  that  the  thing,  the  reality, 
sensation  is  only  conceived  of  under  the 
form  of  the  object  which  is  presented  to  the 
eye,  but  not  as  human  sense— activity, 
"praxis,"  not  subjectively.  It  therefore 
came  about  that  the  active  side  in  opposi- 
tion to  materialism  was  developed  from 
idealism,  but  only  abstractly ;  this  was  nat- 
ural, since  idealism  does  not  recognize 
real  tangible  facts  as  such.  Feuerbach  is( 
willing,  it  is  true,  to  distinguish  objects  of 
sensation  from  objects  existing  in  thought, 
but  he  conceives  of  human  activity  itself 
not  as  objective  activity.  He,  therefore,  in 
the  "Wesen  des  Christenthums, "  regards 
only  theoretical  activity  as  generally  hu- 
man, while  the  "praxis"  is  conceived  and 
fixed  only  in  its  disgusting  form. 


130  FEUERBACH 

II. 

The  question  if  objective  truth  is  possible 
to  human  thought  is  not  a  theoretical  but  a 
practical  question.  In  practice  man  must 
prove  the  truth,  that  is  the  reality  and  force 
in  his  actual  thoughts.  The  dispute  as  to 
the  reality  or  non-reality  of  thought  which 
separates  itself,  "the  praxis,' '  is  a  purely 
scholastic  question. 

III. 

The  materialistic  doctrine  that  men  are 
the  products  of  conditions  and  education, 
different  men  therefore  the  products  of 
other  conditions  and  changed  education, 
forgets  that  circumstances  may  be  altered 
by  men  and  that  the  educator  has  himself 
to  be  educated.  It  necessarily  happens 
therefore  that  society  is  divided  into  two 
parts,  of  which  one  is  elevated  above  so- 
ciety (Robert  Owen  for  example). 

The    occurrence     simultaneously    of    a  1 
change  in  conditions  and  human  activity  can 
only  be  comprehended  and  rationally  un- 
derstood as  a  revolutionary  fact. 


FEUERBACH  131 

IV. 

Feuerbach  proceeds  from  a  religious  self- 
alienation,  the  duplication  of  the  world  into 
a  religious,  imaginary,  and  a  real  world. 
His  work  consists  in  the  discovery  of  the 
jnaterial  foundations  of  the  religious  world. 
He  overlooked  the  fact  that  after  carrying 
this  to  completion  the  important  matter 
still  remains  unaccomplished.  The  fact 
that  the  material  foundation  annuls  itself 
and  establishes  for  itself  a  realm  in  the 
clouds  can  only  be  explained  from  the  heter- 
ogeneity and  self-contradiction  of  the  mate- 
rial foundation.  This  itself  must  first  become 
understood  in  its  contradictions  and  so  be- 
come thoroughly  revolutionized  by  the  elim- 
ination of  the  contradiction.  After  the  earth- 
ly family  has  been  discovered  as  the  secret 
of  the  Holy  Family,  one  must  have  theoret- 
ically criticised  and  theoretically  revolu- 
tionised it  beforehand. 

V. 

Feuerbach,  not  satisfied  with  abstract 
thought,  invokes  impressions  produced  by 
the  senses,  but  does  not  comprehend  sensa- 
tion as  practical  sensory  activities. 


132  FEUEEBACH 

VI. 

Feuerbach  dissolves  religion  in  human- 
ity. But  humanity  is  not  an  abstraction 
dwelling  in  each  individual.  In  its  reality 
it  is  the  ensemble  of  the  conditions  of  so- 
ciety. 

Feuerbach,  who  does  not  enquire  into  this 
fact,  is  therefore  compelled: 

1.  To  abstract  religious  sentiment  from 
the  course  of  history,  to  place  it  by  itself, 
and  to  pre-suppose  an  abstract,  isolated,  hu- 
man individual. 

2.  Humanity  is  therefore  only  compre- 
hended by  him  as  a  species,  as  a  hidden  sort 
of  merely  natural  identity  of  qualities  in 
which  many  individuals  are  embraced. 

VII. 

Therefore  Feuerbach  does  not  see  that  re- 
ligious feeling  is  itself  a  product  of  society, 
and  that  the  abstract  individual  which  he 
analyses  belongs  in  reality  to  a  certain  form 
of  society. 

The  life  of  society  is  essentially  practical. 
All  the  mysteries  which  seduce  speculative 
thought  into  mysticism  find  their  solution  in 


FEUERBACH  133 

human  practice  and  in  concepts  of  this  prac- 
tice. 

IX, 

The  highest  point  to  which  materialism 
attains,  that  is  the  materialism  which  com- 
prehends sensation,  not  as  a  practical  fact, 
is  the  point  of  view  of  the  single  individual 
in  bourgeois  society. 

X. 

The  standpoint  of  the  old  materialism  is 

J^y  i  bourgeois ' '  society ;  the  standpoint  of  the 

new,  human  society,  or  associated  humanity. 


i>0  oM^*  ^ 


XI. 


Philosophers  have  only  interpreted  the 
world  differently,  but  the  point  is  to 
change  it. 


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